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.

Say a word, say a thousand to me on the telephone and I shall choose the wrong one to cling to as though you had said it after long deliberation when only I provoked it from you, I will cling to it from among a thousand, to be provoked and hurl it back with something I mean no more than you meant that, something for you to cling to and retreat clinging to.

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…

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 you want to make a million you don’t have to understand money, what you have to understand is people’s fears about money.

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

The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

I have not become the Kings First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.

Understanding is a two-way street.

He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul’s estate.

That which we call character is a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means. It is conceived of as a certain undemonstrable force, a familiar or genius, by whose impulses the man is guided, but whose counsels he cannot impart.

A heart well prepared for adversity in bad times hopes, and in good times fears for a change in fortune.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

Nothing is too high for the daring of mortals: we storm heaven itself in our folly.

In the long run you hit only what you aim at. Therefore, though you should fail immediately, you had better aim at something high.

An honest man is always a child.

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.