Bob Wake > Bob's Quotes

“You can always see an ancient city better when it’s been bombed.”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

“I was one of only two people on staff who knew how semicolons worked.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“—The one about the lady from the First Unitarian Church of Kennebunkport, M.E. who orders monogrammed napkins for a church luncheon and . . . Oh, I’ve spoiled it.”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

“Death is an artist, not an intellectual.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“The father is dying, as did his (and as did his).”
― Martin Amis, Experience

“Let the soil here below stink and turn to a scarlet muck, and let us crawl through it until our mouths and nostrils fill with it and we drown in it with our hands on each other’s throats—I no longer resist this war. I relish it.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“Father took race to be the central and inescapable fact of American life and character, and thus he did not apologize for its being the central fact of his own life and character.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“On her way back she thought she noticed that everything in the world was secretly contrived for beatings. It was just a thought that went through her mind. Parents their child. The state its convicts. The military its soldiers. The rich the poor. The coachman his horse. People went walking with big dogs on leashes. Everyone would rather intimidate another person than come to an understanding with him.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“There are rumors of rats down here as big as German shepherds, the people not the dogs.”
― Charlie Kaufman, Antkind

“The jokes. The jokes. The fucking endless jokes.”
― Charlie Kaufman, Antkind

“Can you imagine Jesus as boss of a coal mine?”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“Like a good many men, artists or not, Stone liked to go out with ravishing women who were some kind of crazy, but preferred to go home to somebody sane. With the possible exception of Pablo Picasso, this pattern of behavior is not sustainable for anyone in the long term.”
― Madison Smartt Bell, Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone

“What are we to do with the art of profoundly compromised men?”
― Adrienne Miller, In the Land of Men: A Memoir

“It is not impossible that free will is an invention of the novelist, who is in the interiority business.”
― Adrienne Miller, In the Land of Men: A Memoir

“Happiness, after all, depends for the most part not on one’s ability to resolve contradictions but on making them disappear, the way the gaps between trees disappear when we look down a long avenue of them.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“Naturally, no professional man of our time bases his arguments on those of philosophy and theology, but as perspectives—empty, like space, and yet, like space, telescoping the objects in it—these two rivals for the last word of wisdom persist everywhere in invading the optics of each special field of knowledge.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“We have a tendency in this country to fall in love with noted personalities, like the drunks who throw their arms around a stranger’s neck, only to push him away again after a while, for equally obscure reasons.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“Every man is two people, and one hardly knows whether it is in the morning or in the evening that he reverts to his real self.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“There is a nameless mood abroad in the world today, a feeling in the blood of more than a few people, an expectation of worse things to come, a readiness to riot, a mistrust of everything one reveres.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“Within reality there is a senseless craving for unreality.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“Philosophers are despots who have no armies to command, so they subject the world to their tyranny by locking it up in a system of thought,”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“A world of qualities without a man has arisen, of experiences without the person who experiences them, and it almost looks as though ideally private experience is a thing of the past, and that the friendly burden of personal responsibility is to dissolve into a system of formulas of possible meanings.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“One can talk about cars and X rays, of course, with a certain amount of feeling, but what else can one do about the countless other inventions and discoveries that nowadays every single day brings forth, other than to marvel at human inventiveness in general, which in the long run gets to be too tiresome!”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses; it can move in all directions, and put on all the guises of truth. The truth, by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“And Törless could not think but that the problems of philosophy had been solved once and for all by Kant, rendering that a pointless pursuit, just as he also thought it was not worth writing poetry after Goethe and Schiller.”
― Robert Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless

“He felt himself, in a way, torn between two worlds: a solid, bourgeois world where ultimately everything was ordered and rational, as he was accustomed to from home, and an untrammelled one full of darkness, blood, and undreamt-of surprises.”
― Robert Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless

“My dick lay limply inside my trousers, like a little lunch packed by Mother.”
― Wallace Shawn, The Designated Mourner

“You can sum me up in about ten words: a former student of English literature who—who—who went downhill from there! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha!”
― Wallace Shawn, The Designated Mourner

“Sorrow, irritation, doubt, anxiety, or any other turbulent emotion that might otherwise keep her from sleeping, eating, or, in extreme cases, speaking coherently or getting out of bed, would disappear almost completely when she was in the act of telling a story.”
― Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

“Does every conversation with you have to be the director’s cut?”
― Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn