William Gaddis

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.

There was the cell where Fr. Eulalio, a thriving lunatic of eighty-six who was castigating himself for unchristian pride at having all the vowels in his name, and greatly revered for his continuous weeping, went blind in an ecstasy of such howling proportions that his canonization was assured.

Originality is a device that untalented people use to impress other untalented people to protect themselves from talented people…

Reading Proust isn’t just reading a book, it’s an experience and you can’t reject an experience.

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”.

Justice? – You get justice in the next world. In this one you have the law.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice. The Bible tells us, ‘How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity.

Christianity is the highest perfection of humanity.

I’m a bit superstitious about certain things, like what shoes to wear. If I wear the wrong shoes, the whole day may go wrong. Or if I don’t get to the bottom of the stairs before the door closes – stupid little things like that. Then I also have all the normal ones, like don’t walking under ladders and so on.

I have a habit of running from the things I’ve prayed for and then asking God to send them again.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

The truth of Zen, just a little bit of it, is what turns one’s humdrum life into one of art.

Before enlightnment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightnment, chop wood, carry water.

The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would solve most the worlds problems.

Music brought me closer to the idea of God.

In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.

Where ignorance is our master, there is no possibility of real peace.

The Christian ethic played an essential part in my upbringing.

If God would have wanted us to live in a permissive society He would have given us Ten Suggestions and not Ten Commandments.

I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.