Donald Barthelme Quotes

I, a product of the New Frontier and Great Society, honestly believed that the world pretty much owed me a living--all I had to do was wait around in order to live better than my parents.

No one had ever said anything like that to Evie. Her parents always wanted to advise or instruct or command. They were good people, but they needed the world to bend to them, to fit into their order of things. Evie had never really quite fit, and when she tried, she’d just pop back out, like a doll squeezed into a too-small box.

In no order of things is adolescence the time of the simple life.

Purchasing power is a license to purchase power. The old proletariat sold its labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time it had was passed pleasantly enough in conversations, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he’s not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he’s being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology.

Almost everything is double like that for adolescents; their lies are true and their truths are lies, and their hearts are broken by the world. They gyre and fall; they see through everything, and are blind.

In order for me to parent well I have to empathize and stay open with my son.

Adolescence is a period of rapid changes. Between the ages of 12 and 17, for example, a parent ages as much as 20 years.

In order for me to parent well I have to empathize and stay open with my son. I am also vulnerable when it comes to trying new things, when I don't feel like I completely know what I am doing. Lack of control.

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?

The abyss beyond our beliefs is something we have to pass through in order to see the world anew, to see it in terms not dictated so much by our culture, our parents, or our religious convictions.

The Genie declared that in his time and place there were scientists of the passions who maintained that language itself, on the one hand, originated in 'infantile pregenital erotic exuberance, polymorphously perverse,' and that conscious attention, on the other, was a 'libidinal hypercathexis' - by which magic phrases they seemed to mean that writing and reading, or telling and listening, were literally ways of making love.

there is such a rebound from parental influence that it generally seems that the child makes use of the directions given by the parent only to avoid the prescribed path.

I didn't know who I was and I didn't know if what was in me was any good. But my parents taught me to believe in myself and to work until something happens.

I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.

Deep down? That sounds like settling to me. You shouldn't have to venture deep down in order to get to love.

A parent does not do everything for their kid. A parent that does everything for their kid produces a kid with no self-confidence.

But Katie knew it was a sin, had known from the moment she made the decision to lie with Adam. However, the transgression wasn't making love without the sanction of marriage. It was that for the first time in her life, Katie had put herself first. Put her own wants and needs above everything and everyone else.

All intelligent investing is value investing - acquiring more that you are paying for. You must value the business in order to value the stock.

Do not be bewildered by the surfaces: in the depths all becomes law.

Education and the process of educating is a total integral, contextual situation which includes students, teachers, parents, administration and environment.

In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession.

Deal with it before it happens. Set things in order before there is confusion.

In order to realize the worth of the anchor we need to feel the stress of the storm.

The Hindu, the Oriental, says that the physical is but the shadow of the Eternal, of the Truth; and he says 'In order to understand the Truth, I must let the shadow go, and not concern myself with it, but with the understanding of the Eternal.' So he does not concern himself with the physical. He is more concerned with the quality of mind and heart. Hence there is disease, there is disorder, and there is chaos and neglect and the gradual running down of the physical.

America will be a country of generosity and warmth, but we will also be a country of law and order.