David > David's Quotes

“A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.”
― Don DeLillo

“I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them. ”
― Boris Pasternak

“The book ‘Outliers’ by Malcolm Gladwell talks about the 10,000-hour theory–that almost anyone can master a skill if they dedicate 10,000 hours to it. The same is true for your side hustle. If you put in the right hours–into the right places–then you can build a successful side hustle, too.

The rate at which you put these hours in is up to you. Yes, if you go slower, then it will take longer. But compared to your other option–doing nothing at all–what’s the hurry?

Here’s the tried and true technique I use to put the necessary time into any new project without overwhelming myself:

Set aside 20 minutes–no more!–every single day to work on your project, and protect those 20 minutes with everything you have. Never let anything get in the way of this time.”
― Rebecca Scott, Hustling 101: Selling your Talents without Selling your Soul

“Holding the bread to her chest, she made her way home, thinking of those dreamy winter afternoons, when the light looked as it did now, the crystalline blue of the sky slipping into a faded purple, as faint as a bruise.”
― Alexis Landau, The Empire of the Senses

“My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”
― Angela Carter

“I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.”
― W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

“Strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“My stories are malevolently anti-narrative, and my essays are maliciously anti-expository, but the ideology of my opposition arrived long after my antagonism had become a trait of character." -- William H. Gass, "Finding a Form”
― William H. Gass, Finding a Form

“Like metaphors and works of art, the people who matter to us are all, so far as we are concerned, inexhaustible. They always remain a step beyond the furthest point our knowledge of them has reached—though only if, and as long as, they still matter to us.”
― Alexander Nehamas, On Friendship

“There are a few vocations (like the practice of poetry or the profession of philosophy) that are so uncalled for by the world, so unremunerative by ordinary standards, so inherently difficult, so undefined, that to chose them suggests that more lies behind the choice than a little encouraging talent and a few romantic ideals. To persevere in such a severe and unrewarding course requires the mobilization of the entire personality--each weakness as well as every strength, each quirk as well as every normality. For any one of the reasons that a philosopher offers to support the principle he has taken in to feed and fatten, there will be in action alongside it, sometimes in the shade of the great notion itself, coarse and brutal causes in frequently stunning numbers, causes with a notable lack of altruism and nobility, causes with shameful aims and antecedents. This has to be understood and accepted. Valery's belief that every philosophy is an important piece of its author's autobiography need not be rejected as reductive; for whatever the subliminal causes and their kind are like, the principle put forth must stand and defend itself like a tree against the wind; it must make its own way out into who knows what other fields of intelligence, to fall or flourish there. -- From "At Death's Door: Wittgenstein”
― William H. Gass, Finding a Form

“The mind's well-being was the well that was poisoned. One doesn't own a little anti-Semitism as if it were a puppy that isn't big enough yet to poop a lot. One yap from the pooch is already too much. Nor is saying "it was only social" a successful excuse. Only social, indeed ... only a mild case. The mild climate renders shirt-sleeves acceptable, loosens ties and collars, allows extremes to seem means, makes nakedness normal, facilitates the growth of weeds. Since the true causes of anti-Semitism do not lie with the Jews themselves (for if they did, anti-Semitism might bear some semblance of reason), they must lie elsewhere--so, if not in the hated, then in the hater, in another mode of misery.

Rationalist philosophers, from the beginning, regarded ignorance and error as the central sources of evil, and the conditions of contemporary life have certainly given their view considerable support. We are as responsible for our beliefs as for our behavior. Indeed, they are usually linked. Our brains respond, as well as our bodies do, to exercise and good diet. One can think of hundreds of beliefs--religious, political, social--which must be as bad for the head as fat is for the heart, and whose loss would lighten and enliven the spirit; but inherently silly ones, like transubstantiation, nowadays keep their consequences in control and relatively close to home. However, anti-Semitism does not; it is an unmitigated moral catastrophe. One can easily imagine how it might contaminate other areas of one's mental system. But is it the sickness or a symptom of a different disease? Humphrey Carpenter's level headed tone does not countenance Pound's corruption. It simply places the problem before us, permitting out anger and our pity.
-- From "Ezra Pound”
― William H. Gass, Finding a Form

“Normally, we are supposed to say farewell to the page even as we look, to see past the cut of the type, hear beyond the shape of the sound, feel more than the heft of the book, to hear the bird sing whose name has been invoked, and think of love being made through the length of the night if the bird's name is nightingale; but when the book itself has the beauty of the bird, and the words do their own singing; when the token is treated as if it, not some divine intention, was holy and had power; when the bird itself is figured in the margins as though that whiteness were a moon-bleached bough and the nearby type the leaves it trembles; and when indigo turbans or vermilion feathers are, with jasmines, pictured so perfectly that touch falls in love with the finger, eyes light, and nostrils flare; when illustrations refuse to illustrate but instead suggest the inside of the reader's head, where a consciousness is being constructed; then the nature of the simple sign is being vigorously denied, and the scene or line or brief rendition is being treated like a thing itself, returning the attention to its qualities and composition. -- From "The Book As a Container of Consciousness”
― William H. Gass, Finding a Form

“The hurt heart heals, but the healed heart still hurts. -- From "Exile" in Finding a Form”
― William H. Gass, Finding a Form

“These Claudines, then…they want to know because they believe they already do know, the way one who loves fruit knows, when offered a mango from the moon, what to expect; and they expect the loyal tender teasing affection of the schoolgirl crush to continue: the close and confiding companionship, the pleasure of the undemanding caress, the cuddle which consummates only closeness; yet in addition they want motherly putting right, fatherly forgiveness and almost papal indulgence; they expect that the sights and sounds, the glorious affairs of the world which their husbands will now bring before them gleaming like bolts of silk, will belong to the same happy activities as catching toads, peeling back tree bark, or powdering the cheeks with dandelions and oranging the nose; that music will ravish the ear the way the trill of the blackbird does; that literature will hold the mind in sweet suspense the way fairy tales once did; that paintings will crowd the eye with the delights of a colorful garden, and the city streets will be filled with the same cool dew-moist country morning air they fed on as children. But they shall not receive what they expect; the tongue will be about other business; one will hear in masterpieces only pride and bitter contention; buildings will have grandeur but no flowerpots or chickens; and these Claudines will exchange the flushed cheek for the swollen vein, and instead of companionship, they will get sex and absurd games composed of pinch, leer, and giggle—that’s what will happen to “let’s pretend.”

'The great male will disappear into the jungle like the back of an elusive ape, and Claudine shall see little of his strength again, his intelligence or industry, his heroics on the Bourse like Horatio at the bridge (didn’t Colette see Henri de Jouvenel, editor and diplomat and duelist and hero of the war, away to work each day, and didn’t he often bring his mistress home with him, as Willy had when he was husband number one?); the great affairs of the world will turn into tawdry liaisons, important meetings into assignations, deals into vulgar dealings, and the en famille hero will be weary and whining and weak, reminding her of all those dumb boys she knew as a child, selfish, full of fat and vanity like patrons waiting to be served and humored, admired and not observed.

'Is the occasional orgasm sufficient compensation? Is it the prize of pure surrender, what’s gained from all that giving up? There’ll be silk stockings and velvet sofas maybe, the customary caviar, tasting at first of frog water but later of money and the secretions of sex, then divine champagne, the supreme soda, and rubber-tired rides through the Bois de Boulogne; perhaps there’ll be rich ugly friends, ritzy at homes, a few young men with whom one may flirt, a homosexual confidant with long fingers, soft skin, and a beautiful cravat, perfumes and powders of an unimaginable subtlety with which to dust and wet the body, many deep baths, bonbons filled with sweet liqueurs, a procession of mildly salacious and sentimental books by Paul de Kock and company—good heavens, what’s the problem?—new uses for the limbs, a tantalizing glimpse of the abyss, the latest sins, envy certainly, a little spite, jealousy like a vaginal itch, and perfect boredom.

'And the mirror, like justice, is your aid but never your friend.' -- From "Three Photos of Colette," The World Within the Word, reprinted from NYRB April 1977”
― William H. Gass, The World Within the Word

“Furber had come in the late fall following that enormous summer, now famous, in which the temperature had hung in the high nineties along the river for weeks, parching the fields, drying and destroying; weeks which had, unmindful of the calendar, fallen undiminished into October so that the leaves shriveled before they fell and fell while green, the river level fell, exposing flat stretches of mud and bottom weed, the Siren Rocks were seen for the first time in twenty years, quite round and disappointingly small, and an unmoving cover of dust lay thickly everywhere, on fields, trees, buildings, on the river itself which crawled beneath it blindly like a mole. -- William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck, p. 97, Penguin Twentieth Century Classics, 1997 (first published by The New American Library 1966).”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“The drive is supposed to take six and a half hours but somehow we have been on the road for eight when we come to the wooden sign sunk into grass that signifies the entrance to Deakins Park, and although Honey is still caterwauling, passing the sign feels like entering protected land, something apart from the ravages of the town. It sounds like hair-splitting to parse the varieties of mobile home, like something only a person obsessed about imperceptible class minutia would do, but there are mobile homes and mobile homes and despite how mortified Mom and I used to be by the fact that her parents lived in a mobile home now I happen to think Deakins Park is just as nice if not nicer than many a suburban cul-de-sac of for example the Nut Tree-adjacent variety. It’s a circle of nicely appointed and discreetly mobile homes of different styles and patterns built on either side of a large circular street, each with a good-size yard. The outer ring of houses is bounded by a split-rail fence, and beyond this the town gives over to the high desert, with low, prickly sagebrush and rafts of tumbleweed through which jackrabbits and antelopes poke delicately in the cool mornings. Everyone has plenty of space and a view of the low-lying mountains ringing the basin. The houses look pretty good. It’s a little neighborhood on the frontier. Home on the range, if you will.”
― Lydia Kiesling, The Golden State

“I've grown lean from eating only the past.”
― Jenny Xie, Eye Level: Poems

“To be profligate in taking in the outer world is to shortchange the interior one." -- "Visual Orders," Eye Level”
― Jenny Xie

“Now the stifling days disrobe/distance giving autonomy the arid space to grow" -- Jenny Xie, "Epistle," Eye Level”
― Jenny Xie

“Clarity is just questioning having eaten its fill." -- "To Be a Good Buddhist is Ensnarement," Eye Level”
― Jenny Xie

“He likes to look at the moon and imagine space. He imagines it to be very silent, very cool. You would definitely need a sweater.”
― Claire Adam, Golden Child

“Yes, alone we are, deeply alone, and always, in store for us, a layer of loneliness even deeper. There is nothing we can do to dispose of that. No, loneliness shouldn’t surprise us, as astonishing to experience as it may be. You can try yourself inside out, but all you are then is inside out and lonely instead of inside in and lonely. My stupid, stupid Merry dear, stupider even that your stupid father, not even blowing up buildings helps. It’s lonely if there are buildings and it’s lonely if there are buildings and it’s lonely if there are no buildings. There is no protest to be lodged against loneliness⎯not all the bombing campaigns in history have made a dent in it. The most lethal of manmade explosives can’t touch it. Stand in awe not of Communism, my idiot child, but of ordinary, everyday loneliness.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“Indeed, most mornings she wakes with a heart that still beats, but is heavy with defeatist thoughts about the futility of life, her life, and, reluctant to face the day she burrows deeper into the covers, seeking shelter in darkness. Unhelpfully, she remembers that she is alone in the world, and not as smart and "with it" as others seem to be, and that her only true talents are hope and delusion. But, she reminds herself, she does have a gift: she is tenacious. And being tenacious means she wants to live. Wanting to live means she must compete, she must participate. She tells herself that these bad, early-morning thoughts are just the residue of some dream she dreamt in the night, and that the sooner she is up and running, the better, and soon she does, she jumps out of bed with sudden determination, and the mere physicality of movement alters something in her brain, and she is awake and back in the column of the living.”
― Tsipi Keller, Nadja on Nadja

“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“.כל כתיבה היא יכירת אינדקס בסוף הספר
.ספר מנחש, ואדם כאדם לוחם בכל מה שכתוב בספרים
ספר שאני כותב תמיד יהיה חכם ממני ואני טיפש ממנו, אבל הוא לא יסגיר אותי כי דרכו אני מנהל את הנקמה שלי, והוא פורץ לי דרך
.”
― Yoram Kaniuk, Der letzte Berliner

“Prepositions are to language as aim is to a gun.”
― Mark Helprin, A Soldier of the Great War

“יראת התאמצה נורא לשנות את תמיר (בעלה, ע"ו), אך ככל שהתאמצה, תמיר נשאר תמיר: חכם ופתוח, ירא שמיים וטוב לב, כלומר מתאים אחד על אחד לרשימת התכונות שהיא חיפשה בחתנה ומצאה בו בחודשיים וחצי שיצאה איתו עד שהם התארסו, אבל אוי כמה חסר מעוף. וכמובן יפה תואר, גבה קומה ורחב כתפיים כמו הגבר שהיא תמיד חלמה שיהיה לה, אבל אוי כמה משעמם. ואוי כמה אדיש, כמה לא מודע אפילו לכל מה שאותה מרגש ומסעיר…”
― Emunah Elon, ותכתבו: אהובתנו