Donald Barthelme

Quotes by Donald Barthelme

• There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the meaning of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena.

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• 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 degree of mutuality, in our parting. And when guests came, she said, you always made me sit in the kitchen. I thought you liked it in the kitchen, I said. You were forever telling me to get out of the bloody kitchen. And when my overbite required correction, she said, you would not pay for the apparatus. Seven years of sitting by the window with your thumb in your mouth, I said. What did you expect? And when I needed a new frock, she said, you hid the Master Charge. There was nothing wrong with the old one, I said, that a few well-placed patches couldn't have fixed. And when we were invited to the Argentine Embassy, she said, you made me drive the car in a chauffeur's cap, and park the car, and stand about with the other drivers outside while you chatted up the Ambassador. You know no Spanish, I pointed out. It was not the happiest of marriages, she said, all in all. There has been a sixty percent increase in single-person households in the last ten years, according to the Bureau of the Census, I told her. Perhaps we are part of a trend.

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• New artists have been obtained. These do not object to, and indeed argue enthusiastically for, the rationalization process. Production is up. Quality-control devices have been installed at those points where the interests of artists and audiences intersect. Shipping and distribution have been improved out of all recognition. (It is in this area, they say in Paraguay, that traditional practices were most blameworthy.) The rationalized art is dispatched from central art dumps to regional art dumps, and from there into the lifestreams of cities. Each citizen is given as much art as his system can tolerate.

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• We could unleash all this technology at once. You can imagine what would happen then. But that's not the interesting thing. What is the interesting thing? The interesting thing is that we have a moral sense. It is on punched cards, perhaps the most advanced and sensitive moral sense the world has ever known. Because it is on punched cards? It considers all considerations in endless and subtle detail, he said. It even quibbles. With this great new moral tool, how can we go wrong? I confidently predict that, although we could employ all this splendid new weaponry I've been telling you about, we're not going to do it.

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• --Why are we fighting them?--They're mad. We're sane.--How do we know?--That we're sane?--Yes.--Am I sane?--To all appearances.--And you, do you consider yourself sane?--I do.--Well, there you have it.--But don't they also consider themselves sane?--I think they know. Deep down. That they're not sane.--How must that make them feel?--Terrible, I should think. They must fight ever more fiercely, in order to deny what they know to be true. That they are not sane.

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• The death of God left the angels in a strange position.

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• See the moon? It hates us.

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• 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 degree of mutuality, in our parting. And when guests came, she said, you always made me sit in the kitchen. I thought you liked it in the kitchen, I said. You were forever telling me to get out of the bloody kitchen. And when my overbite required correction, she said, you would not pay for the apparatus. Seven years of sitting by the window with your thumb in your mouth, I said. What did you expect? And when I needed a new frock, she said, you hid the Master Charge. There was nothing wrong with the old one, I said, that a few well-placed patches couldn't have fixed. And when we were invited to the Argentine Embassy, she said, you made me drive the car in a chauffeur's cap, and park the car, and stand about with the other drivers outside while you chatted up the Ambassador. You know no Spanish, I pointed out. It was not the happiest of marriages, she said, all in all. There has been a sixty percent increase in single-person households in the last ten years, according to the Bureau of the Census, I told her. Perhaps we are part of a trend.

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• New artists have been obtained. These do not object to, and indeed argue enthusiastically for, the rationalization process. Production is up. Quality-control devices have been installed at those points where the interests of artists and audiences intersect. Shipping and distribution have been improved out of all recognition. (It is in this area, they say in Paraguay, that traditional practices were most blameworthy.) The rationalized art is dispatched from central art dumps to regional art dumps, and from there into the lifestreams of cities. Each citizen is given as much art as his system can tolerate.

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• See the moon? It hates us.

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• We could unleash all this technology at once. You can imagine what would happen then. But that's not the interesting thing. What is the interesting thing? The interesting thing is that we have a moral sense. It is on punched cards, perhaps the most advanced and sensitive moral sense the world has ever known. Because it is on punched cards? It considers all considerations in endless and subtle detail, he said. It even quibbles. With this great new moral tool, how can we go wrong? I confidently predict that, although we could employ all this splendid new weaponry I've been telling you about, we're not going to do it.

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• There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the meaning of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena.

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• --Why are we fighting them?--They're mad. We're sane.--How do we know?--That we're sane?--Yes.--Am I sane?--To all appearances.--And you, do you consider yourself sane?--I do.--Well, there you have it.--But don't they also consider themselves sane?--I think they know. Deep down. That they're not sane.--How must that make them feel?--Terrible, I should think. They must fight ever more fiercely, in order to deny what they know to be true. That they are not sane.

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• The death of God left the angels in a strange position.

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• 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.

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• The important thing is the educational experience itself-how to survive it.

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• Lose yourself in the song of the instructions, in the precise, detailed balm of having solved for you that most difficult of problems, what to do next.

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• The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.

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• Yes, success is everything. Failure is more common. Most achieve a sort of middling thing, but fortunately one's situation is always blurred, you never know absolutely quite where you are.

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• Capitalism arose and took off its pajamas. Another day, another dollar. Each man is valued at what he will bring in the marketplace. Meaning has been drained from work and assigned instead to remuneration.

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