William Gaddis

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

Power doesn’t corrupt people; people corrupt power.

Let them look up in the sky then…! if they must be so blind, that cannot see the truth in broad daylight, but must have the whole world in darkness to see the conceit of the stars…

He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?

It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.

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

You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.

All that I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

Tis admirable to consider, how Powerful the Kings are, yet they move by the Breath of their People.

We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described.

The highest panegyric, therefore, that private virtue can receive, is the praise of servants.

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.

Our humanity is a poor thing, except for the divinity that stirs within us.

Arguments are like fire-arms which a man may keep at home but should not carry about with him.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it.

Although the masters make the rules for the wise men and the fools got nothing, Ma, to live up to.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.

Dear to us are those who love us… but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.