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 nerv...
We have decided to stop voting, so pull down the posters. Let’s get all those ugly faces off our streets and out of our elective offices. We are not going to vote any more, no matter how often they co...
Some fathers have made themselves over into convincing replicas of beautiful sea animals, and some into convincing replicas of people they hated as children. Some fathers are goats, some are milk, som...
Fathers are teachers of the true and not-true, and no father ever knowingly teaches what is not true. In a cloud of unknowing, then, the father proceeds with his instruction.
A week later she is still with me. She is departing by degrees. If I tore her hair out, no one but me would love her. But she don't want me to tear her hair out. I wear different shirts for her: red,...
Art is a meditation upon external reality rather than a representation of external reality
This is one of the most crucial things that the newcomer needs to know about Barthelme. Though his stuff is sometimes difficult to puncture, and sometimes difficult to follow, while you’re finding you...
The mind carries you with it, away from what you are supposed to do, toward things that cannot be explained rationally, toward difficulty, lack of clarity, late-afternoon light.
The best way to live is by not knowing what will happen to you at the end of the day, when the sun goes down and the supper is to be cooked.-from The Educational Experience
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 kno...
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...
Miss Mandible wants to make love to me but she hesitates because I am officially a child; I am, according to the records, according to the gradebook on her desk, according to the card index in the pri...
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
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.
How old are you Hogo. Thirty-five Jane. A not unpleasant age to be. You don’t mind then. That you are not young. It has its buggy aspects as what does not? You don’t mind then that you are sagging in...
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 aspe...
You may not be interested in absurdity, she said firmly, but absurdity is interested in you.
Then Wanda proposed a health. Health to abandoned wives! she said. Well now, I said. 'Abandoned,' that's a little strong. Pushed out, jettisoned, abjured, thrown away, she said. I remember, I said, a...
The story ends. It was written for several reasons. Nine of them are secrets. The tenth is that one should never cease considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever, no matter wha...
The first thing I did was make a mistake. I thought I had understood capitalism, but what I had done was assume an attitude -melancholy sadness- toward it.