Quotes from William Gaddis

and she turned for the stairs as the sound of rain came, finally, scattered across the roof, a fall that now gave substance to the stilled beams of headlamps in the drive where those of flashlights rose and fell to the cadenced steps come back and round the range of yew and up the terrace and through the door to fall on broken glass and flee across the inkstained carpet, darting, climbing, caught fixed in niches, they scaled the walls and leaped the beams to skirt the hayloft.

That fever had passed; but for the rest of his life it never left his eyes.

But what I remember is the countryside then, the brilliance of outdoors and outwindows, and the sunlight streaming through the lozenge shapes of the glass, and we were locked away from it, locked inside to worship. And there was the sun out there for everyone else to see. Good God, tell me Clovis wasn't lonely at dawn. Tell me he wasn't sick at the sunset.

all writing worth reading comes, like suicide, from outrage or revenge

He was doing missionary work. But from the outset he had little success in convincing his charges of their responsibility for a sin committed at the beginning of creation, one which, as they understood it, they were ready and capable (indeed, they carried charms to assure it) of duplicating themselves. He did no better convincing them that a man had died on a tree to save them all: an act which one old Indian, if Gwyon had translated correctly, regarded as 'rank presumption.

said, —Monasteries are a good thing for America, they help keep the homosexuals off the streets.

All we've got left to protect here is a system that's set up to promote the meanest possibilities in human nature and make them look good.

A man's damnation is his own damned business.

What greater comfort does time afford, than the objects of terror re-encountered, and their fraudulence exposed in the flash of reason?

Someone had already remarked that Bruckner had been Hitler's favorite composer, someone else, that there was something wrong with any young person who really enjoyed the late Beethoven; someone had already confided that the soap business in America amounted to seven million dollars a year, someone else that advertising amounted to seven billion.

fragments of a conversation she had left a little earlier (on Rilke, not Rilke's poetry but Rilke the man, who refused to be psychoanalyzed for fear of purging his genius);

Suffer barbaric childhood to give and receive remorselessly; civilized age learns to protect what it has, to neither give nor accept freely, to trust it's own mistrust above faith, and intriguing others above the innocent. Intrigue, after all, is rational, something the mind can sink it's teeth into, and defeat it with the good digestion of reason, a hopeless prospect for the toothless heart, and God only knows what innocence will do next.

TO A CHILD, BEHELD IN SUMMER RAIMENT Little girl, one lesser garment will suffice to clothe your crotch, Hide that undiscovered cavern Where old Time will wind his watch.

You and I doctor, on the beach.

Go out among them and tell them that their nostalgia for places they have never been is sex

Yes, did you hear what that woman said? . . . I think it's the artist is the only person who is really given the capability of being happy, maybe not all the time, but sometimes. Don't you think so? Don't you think so? . . .

If we believe that love is weakness? And people resent it, because they think it's an admission of weakness, they draw away from it… and that's why you kill the thing you love, because it's your weakness personified. If you kill it, you will your weakness before it kills you.

he chose, not the disquieting road to serenity, but the serenely narrow path to eventual and total derangement.

You just can't understand anything you can't get your hands on, anything you can't feel or see or, or count...

The room was filled with smoke, dry worn-out smoke retaining in it like a web the insectile cadavers of dry husks of words which had been spoken and should be gone, the breaths exhaled not to be breathed again. But the words went on, and in those brief interruptions between cigarettes the exhalations were rebreathed.

People who would soon be seen in New York reading French books were seen here reading Italian.

Stupidity's the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.

Sincerity becomes the honesty of people who cannot be honest with themselves.

Free trade and Christianity, it's the German East Africa Company, it's French Equatorial Africa, it's the Belgians cutting down the Congo population from twenty million to ten in barely twenty years, by nineteen fourteen there's nothing left to plunder in Africa so they go to war with each other in Europe instead that's what the whole damned first world war was all ab...