Shelter in Place Quotes

“having some warm and fuzzy impulse to make the world a better place isn’t enough. It doesn’t make you an artist. What’s been lost is any appreciation of virtuosity, of flair.”
― David Leavitt, Shelter in Place

“What, in watching a bunch of so-called analysts sitting around a table with empty coffee mugs, congratulating each other on agreeing with each other? The news isn’t news anymore, it’s just pompous opinionating, the purpose of which is to keep us anxious, because these people, these newspeople, even your beloved Rachel Maddow, they know that as long as they can keep us anxious, as long as they dangle the carrot of consolation in front of us, they’ve got us hooked. They’re no different than the French papers in 1940, just more sophisticated. And more venal.”
― David Leavitt, Shelter in Place

“Era la padronanza di sé che pietrificava e allarmava Pablo più di tutto, perché veniva dalla giovinezza e dalla bellezza, come quella che un tempo aveva conosciuto anche lui, e proprio per questo sapeva che non avrebbe conosciuto mai più.”
― David Leavitt, Shelter in Place

“It’s one thing to refuse an invitation,” Aaron said, “another to be told you’ll never get one.”
― David Leavitt, Shelter in Place

“It’s what I fear, which for me is as good as knowing.”
― David Leavitt, Shelter in Place

“If the strength of our feelings was in proportion to the events that provoke them, the world would not be the place it is,”
― David Leavitt, Shelter in Place

“self-preservation has one virtue, which is that it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is. With altruism, there’s almost always a hidden motive. The benefactor wants to be lionized or, worse, have the person he’s helping at his mercy. Otherwise why would people who give money to universities want buildings named after them?”
― David Leavitt, Shelter in Place

“What’s wrong with Barbara Kingsolver?” Eva asked. “She is the embodiment of liberal piety at its most middlebrow and tendentious. Her novels are the beef ribs of fiction.”
― David Leavitt, Shelter in Place

“You’re lucky. You’ve got money—enough money to rescue, and to choose who you rescue—and you want the satisfaction of exercising that power. And yet there’s another side to it. There’s my admitting, my having to admit, that if I’d led a better, more orderly life, I wouldn’t be in this position,”
― David Leavitt, Shelter in Place

“The sickness that’s the price you pay for cure,”
― David Leavitt, Shelter in Place

“Self-sufficiency is the core principle of conservatism. At least my conservatism.” “Survival of the fittest? And yet your people want creationism taught in the schools.”
― David Leavitt, Shelter in Place

“The thing you’ve got to understand about Eva and me is that we have a system. She does the wanting, I do the paying. That’s how it’s always been with us, and if I’m to be honest, until now it’s suited me as well as it has her. Maybe better, since it’s spared me the burden of having to want things for myself.”
― David Leavitt, Shelter in Place

“For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.”
― David Leavitt, Shelter in Place

“This isn’t the end of the story. Maybe it’s the end of a part of the story, but not the whole of it.”
― David Leavitt, Shelter in Place

“With any luck, that’ll be the silver lining of this fucking election, that when writers start to feel oppressed again they’ll start to write books worth reading instead of all that idiotic upper-middle-class self-absorbed liberal navel-gazing crap we got when Obama was president.”
― David Leavitt, Shelter in Place