Quotes from Donald Barthelme

Pia was chopping up an enormous cabbage, a cabbage big as a basketball. The cabbage was of an extraordinary size. It was a big cabbage. "That's a big cabbage," Edward said. "Big," Pia said.

The snow is coming, she said. Soon it will be snow time. Together then as in other snow times. Drinking busthead 'round the fire. Truth is a locked room that we knock the lock off from time to time, and then board up again. Tomorrow you will hurt me, and I will inform you that you have done so, and so on and so on. To hell with it. Come, viridian friend, come and sup with me.

Have you noticed the weather? asked Thomas. All turned to look for the weather.

We regarded each other sitting around the breakfast table with its big cardboard boxes of Fear, Chix, and Rats.

Strings of language extend in every direction to bind the world into a rushing, ribald whole.

I sit down on the curb, outside the Opera. People passing look at me. I will wait here for a hundred years. Or until the hot meat of romance is cooled by the dull gravy of common sense once more

Driving Horace and Margot smoothly to the Armory, the new cabdriver thought about basketball. Why do they always applaud the man who makes the shot? Why don't they applaud the ball? It is the ball that actually goes into the net. The man doesn't go into the net. Never have I seen a man going into the net.

Of course we had hoped that he would take up his sword as part of the President's war on poetry. The time is ripe for that. The root causes of poetry have been studied and studied. And now that we know that pockets of poetry still exist in our great country, especially in the large urban centers, we ought to be able to wash it out totally in one generation, if we put our backs into it.

Hubert complains that the electric wastebasket has been overheating. I haven't noticed it but that's what Hubert says and Hubert is rarely wrong about things that don't matter. The electric wastebasket is a security item. Papers dropped into it are destroyed instantly. How the electric wastebasket accomplishes this is not known. An intimidation followed by a demoralization eventuating in a disintegration, one assumes. It is not emptied. There are not even ashes.

Nothing like a suck of the breast.

This muck heaves and palpitates. It is multi-directional and has a mayor.

Three rebellions ago, the air was fresher. The soft pasting noises of the rebel billposters remind us of Oklahoma, where everything is still the same.

He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that's not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it, he is insane because when he loved you, you didn't notice.

Yes, the saint was underrated quite a bit, then, mostly by people who didn't like things that were ineffable… …a lot of people don't like things that are unearthly, the things of this earth are good enough for them, and they don't mind telling you so. "If he'd just go out and get a job, like everybody else, then he could be saintly all day long…" —from "The Temptations of St. Anthony," by Donald Barthelme

mead for my men!

And Harold came into Perpetua's apartment. He said, 'I just want to know one thing. Are you happy?' 'Sure,' Perpetua said. (Donald Barthelme, Perpetua)

I have to admit we are mired in the most exquisite mysterious muck. This muck heaves and palpitates. It is multi-directional and has a mayor.

Dun-colored fathers tend to shy at obstacles, and therefore you do not want a father of this color, because life, in one sense, is nothing but obstacles, and his continual shying will reduce your nerves to grease.

Dan keeps telling Snow White that Christmas is coming! How can he be killed most easily? With the fewest stains?

you get Kandinsky, a bad mother, all them pick-up-sticks pictures...

Do I want to be loved in spite of?Do you? Does anyone? But aren't we all to some degree? Aren't there important parts of all of us which must be, so to say, gazed past? I turn a blind eye to that aspect of you and turn a blind eye to that aspect of me.

My mother was a royal virgin, Peterson said, and my father a shower of gold. My childhood was pastoral and energetic and rich in experiences which developed my character. As a young man I was noble in reason, infinite in faculty, in form express and admirable, and in apprehension... Peterson went on and on and although he was, in a sense, lying, in a sense he was not.

Well, what shall I do next? What is the next thing demanded of me by history?

your father and I were in the trenches together, in the Great War. That was a war all right. Oh I know there have been other wars since, better-publicized ones, more expensive ones perhaps, but our war is the one I'll always remember. Our war is the one that means war to me.