William Gaddis

Esther liked books out where everyone could see them, a sort of graphic index to the intricate labyrinth of her mind arrayed to impress the most casual guest, a system of immediate introduction which she had found to obtain in a number of grimy intellectual households in Greenwich Village.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

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

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.

That’s what I can’t stand. I know I’ll bounce back, and that’s what I can’t stand.

Fearful of missing anything, he read on, filled with this anticipation which was half terror, of coming upon something which would touch him, not simply touch him but lift him and carry him away.

Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

Practice makes perfect, and nobody’s perfect, so why practice?

If you injure your neighbour, better not do it by halves.

Tomorrow is an old deceiver, and his cheat never grows stale.

Personally, I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.

All mankind love a lover.

Acorns were good until bread was found.

Do you know that the tendrils of graft and corruption have become mighty interlacing roots so that even men who would like to be honest are tripped and trapped by them?

Sometimes the place you are used to is not the place you belong.

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

A lucky person gets up in the morning, puts both feet on the floor, knows what they’re about to do and thinks it still matters.

Ignorance… is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.

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”.

We are apt to love praise, but not deserve it. But if we would deserve it, we must love virtue more than that.

Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.