Quotes from John Barth

remember that there's always another way of seeing things: that's the beginning of wisdom.

Having poured my drink, I may not live to taste it, or that it may pass a live man's tongue to burn a dead man's belly; that having slumbered, I may never wake, or having waked, may never living sleep. Having heard tick, will I hear tock? Having served, will I volley? Having sugared will I cream? Having eithered, will I or? Itching, will I scratch? Hemming, will I haw?

Plot is] the gradual perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a new and complexified equilibrium.

T]he world is richer in associations than meanings . . . and it is the part of wisdom to distinguish between the two.

The nightsea journey may be absurd, but here we swim, will-we nill-we, against the flood, onward and upward, toward a shore that may not exist and couldn't be reached if it did.

There is no way to master the fact with which I live.

My feeling about technique in art is that it has about the same value as technique in lovemaking. That is to say, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill; but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

Too late she saw: what she'd favored him with in jest he had received with adoration.

And never mind that the lessons he meant to be helpful, his students always make people miserable with, and flunk anybody that disagrees with them!

we don't know what drives and sustains us, only that we are most miserably driven and, imperfectly, sustained.

Intellectual discussion, after all, is the real joy of the winter of life, when other pleasures have flown, as it were.

Although my law practice pays my hotel bill, I consider it no more my career than a hundred other things: sailing, drinking, walking the streets, writing my 'Inquirey', starting at walls hunting ducks and 'coons,reading, playing politics, and whatnot. I'm interested in any number of things, and enthusiastic about nothing.

beg Love's pardon for your want of faith. Helen chose you without reason because she loves you without cause; embrace her without question and watch your weather change.

The story of your life is not your life. It is your story.

That clever folk care less for what ye think than why ye think it.

people still fall in love, and out, yes, in and out, and out and in, and they please each other, and hurt each other, isn't that the truth, and they do these things in more or less conventionally dramatic fashion, unfashionable or not, go on, I'm going, and what goes on between them is still not only the most interesting but the most important thing in the bloody murderous world

Love it is that drives and sustains us!' I translate: we don't know what drives and sustains us, only that we are most miserably driven and, imperfectly, sustained. Love is how we call our ignorance of what whips us.

Let your repentance salt my shoe leather, I said presently, and then, as I lately sheathed my blade of anger, so sheath you my blade of love.

En ningún caso, solía insistir, comprendían los magos necesariamente su arte, a pesar de que la experiencia lo había llevado a un par de conclusiones generales sobre el tema. Por ejemplo, que cada vez que aprendía algo nuevo sobre sus poderes, esos poderes disminuían, o en todo caso, quedaban alterados.

My classes commenced on the seventh of September, a tall blue day as crisp as the white starched blouses of the coeds who filed into my classroom and nervously took their seats. Standing behind the lectern at eight o'clock sharp, suit fresh-pressed and chin scraped clean, I felt my nostrils flare like a stud's at the nubby tight sex of them, flustered and pink-scrubbed, giggling and moist; my tighs flexed, and I yawned ferociously.

When you're lost, the smartest thing to do is stay put till you're found, hollering if necessary

All the same, they [young, twenty-somethings] can't help feeling that the aged and even the infirm have somehow elected that condition ... or have as it were been assigned those roles ... so that they ... can play their youthful-energetic, all but immutable selves.

One reason for not writing a lost-in-the-funhouse story is that either everybody's felt what Ambrose feels, in which case it goes without saying, or else no normal person feels such things, in which case Ambrose is a freak.

I hope I'm a fiction without real hope.