William Gaddis

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

How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible.

What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it, you become its prey.

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.

He took off his hat and shook it (having hurried home as though his own coronation were waiting), and moved now with the slow deliberation of lonely people who have time for every meager requirement of their lives.

If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.

It’s powerful to have strong men but what does that strength mean?

How pleasant it is for a father to sit at his child’s board. It is like an aged man reclining under the shadow of an oak which he has planted.

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.

Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like servants.

The remedy is worse than the disease.

It were endless to dispute upon everything that is disputable.

The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.

Who then is free? The wise man who can command himself.

No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.

We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light.

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

The walking of Man is falling forwards.