William Gaddis

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

We want someone to bring us the news.

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.

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.

It is a naked city. Faith is not pampered, nor hope encouraged; there is no place to lay one’s exhaustion: but instead pinnacles skewer it undisguised against vacancy.

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…

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.

Patience makes lighter What sorrow may not heal.

People die of fright and live of confidence.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

There are no have-to’s, just choices.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.

It doesn’t matter that your dream came true if you spent your whole life sleeping.

Undeservedly you will atone for the sins of your fathers.

I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.

Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.

I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.

To hold a pen is to be at war.