William Gaddis

Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.

He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?

The Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa….Leonardo had eye trouble….Art couldn’t explain it….But now we’re safe, since science can explain it. Maybe Milton wrote Paradise Lost because he was blind? And Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because he was deaf…

I’ll tell you why yes, because why people lie is, because when people stop lying you know they’ve stopped caring.

The function of this school is custodial. It’s here to keep these kids off the streets until the girls are big enough to get pregnant and the boys are old enough to go out and hold up a gas station.

What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology.

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

The physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer. We create our bodies as we create the experience of our world.

I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

I have lived some thirty-odd years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.

Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.

Disappointment, when it involves neither shame nor loss, is as good as success; for it supplies as many images to the mind, and as many topics to the tongue.

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass, they see face to face; and their converse is free as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.

In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.

And when a woman’s will is as strong as the man’s who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.

Laws control the lesser man… Right conduct controls the greater one.

God enters by a private door into every individual.