The Verificationist Quotes

“There is nothing more seductive — and dangerous — than being listened to.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“We eat pancakes to escape loneliness, yet within moments we want nothing more than our freedom from ever having so much as thought about pancakes.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“We eat pancakes to escape loneliness, yet within moments we want nothing more than our freedom from ever having so much as thought about pancakes. Nothing can prevent us, after eating pancakes, from feeling the most awful regret. After eating pancakes, our great mission in life becomes the repudiation of the pancakes and everything served along with them, the bacon and the syrup and the sausage and coffee and jellies and jams. But these things are beneath mention, compared with the pancakes themselves. It is the pancake--Pancakes! Pancakes!--that we never learn to respect.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“Have you ever noticed?--people, no matter how beautiful or desirable, invariably will, if observed closely while going about their daily business of keeping alive, begin to seem like monsters.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“Quando amiamo una persona che ci risulta peculiare, non è di regola la mera peculiarità a suscitare in noi un affetto più profondo; ci sentiamo anzi toccati da ciò che è condiviso e storico: una buona o cattiva famiglia, magari, l'infanzia piena d'amore e quella priva di amicizie, una madre sola o un padre che beve, il bisogno di solitudine e il terrore della solitudine, tutte quelle cose eccitanti e provvidenziali che costituiscono la base di ciò che chiamiamo, in mancanza di un termine migliore, personalità.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“Let him hurl these pieces of toast like new and radical ideas that must be cast into the world. Pieces of toast like angry children who will hit us and upset us and change our ways of thinking and feeling.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“Gli esseri umani, nel loro narcisismo, paiono avere la necessità di ripetersi costantemente che vivono sull'orlo di una nuova, straordinaria epoca in cui la vergogna e le inibizioni saranno problemi del passato.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“Ritengo piuttosto che l'osservanza religiosa sia perlopiù un modo di rappresentare la vita quotidiana per ciò che realmente, nell'esperienza di molti, è: un cammino di fallimenti significativi.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“Ci avete mai fatto caso? Le persone, per quanto belle o desiderabili, immancabilmente, se osservate da vicino mentre sono intente ai gesti della quotidiana sopravvivenza, cominciano a sembrare mostri.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“Il mio buonumore non durò. Temo di non essere incline a un atteggiamento allegro o spensierato.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“What is a pancake? Cooked batter, covered in sugar and butter. It is food. But it is not as food, not as sustenance that we crave the pancake. No, the pancake, or flapjack if you will, is a childish pleasure; smothered in syrup, buried beneath ice cream, the pancake symbolises our escape from respectability, eating as a form of infantile play. The environments where pancakes are served and consumed are, in this context, special playrooms for a public ravenous for sweetness, that delirious sweetness of long-ago breakfasts made by mother, sweetness of our infancy and our great, lost, toddler’s omnipotence. Look around. Notice, if you will, these lighting fixtures suspended from the ceiling like pretty mobiles over a crib. Notice the indestructible plastic orange seating materials designed to repel spills and stains. Notice these menus that unfold like colorful, laminated boards in those games we once played on rainy days at home, those unforgettable indoor days when we felt safe and warm, when we knew ourselves, absolutely, to be loved. We come to the Pancake House because we are hungry. We call out in our hearts to our mothers, and it is the Pancake House that answers. The Pancake House holds us! The Pancake House restores us to beloved infancy! The Pancake House is our mother in this motherless world!”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“Readers of symbols are forever at the mercy of desire.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“Relationships are like powerful moods that people share.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“I think most observance is really more a way of conceptualizing day-to-day life as what it actually is for many people, a progress of meaningful failures.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“Choice, with its inevitable invitations to loss, is always such a trial.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist