Donald Barthelme Quotes

He was a super shiny boy and I liked the shape of him. Under the blanket. In the shower. I liked his shadow on the street and his imprint on the sofa. I hated the smell of hair gel on his head, but I loved it on the pillow. I love the smell of losing someone.

From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

There's no ifs and buts or maybes, you're gonna miss, you're gonna miss my loving.

Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.

But Anne, do you love him?" I asked curiously. The curve of her hood hid all but the corner of her smile. "I am a fool to own it, but I am in a fever for his touch.

Everything I see and touch reminds me of him, and so everything I see and touch is perfect.

By the time I recognize this moment, this moment will be gone. . . But I will bend the light, pretend that it somehow lingered on

I could drink a case of you.

And for just a fleeting moment, a tiny wisp of time that hung in the air like fireflies in summer skies, she wondered if she was in love with him again.

What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.

After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.

as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.

The world's decay where the wind's hands have passed, And my head, worn out with love, at rest In my hands, and my hands full of dust.

Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't ever quite repeat anything, and I've been so yours, here--

It was strange how you didn’t realise how much you loved a place until you had lost it completely.

I missed her then but it was an odd sort of missing because by then, I knew the meaning of forever.

You shook his hand?" Adrian asked incredulously … “With all that red-hot passion, it’s a wonder you guys can stay away from each other

But there was more, as there always is when the love goes. She was haunted, naturally. Otherwise what is the point, why leave your rickety house, and why this yo-yo world giving us things and yanking them back?

This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.

You're only two years older than me, darling. Where have you been all my life?

Novelty is to love like bloom to fruit; it gives a luster which is easily effaced, but never returns.

God knows I didn't mean to fall in love with her