David Leavitt Quotes

I am the epitome of a walking contradiction for various reasons, only one of which being that I feel my existence is of heaven and hell.

… like looking for an atheist in heaven

In our heart we know that life loves life. Yet we feast on some of the other life-forms with which we share our planet; we kill to live. Taste is what carries us across that rocky moral terrain, what makes the horror palatable, and the paradox we could not defend by reason melts into a jungle of sweet temptations.

Men turn their faces to hell, and hope to get to heaven; why don't they walk into the horsepond, and hope to be dry?.

The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.

I suppose I wanted to have my cake and eat it. But then again, what were you going to do with your cake if not eat it? Frame it? Use it as a sachet in your underwear drawer?

One realizes after a long time that, actually, we are contradictory, all of us.

One may like the love and despise the lover.

Everything we knew condemned us, and our questioning condemned us most of all. Knowledge was the way of our people, and knowledge was dangerous. It was the first thing that freed you and the thing that put you in peril. It was the key to the ten gates. I saw them clearly now, each and every one, the gates that were there for me. Ashes, Bones, Grass, Heart, Stone, Love, Sorrow, Blood, Earth, Sky.

Sweetest nut hath sourest rind.

But what are you going to do about the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?

The heart and the mind, what an enigma.

Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.

My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, "Contradiction is how we operate."

Love is the grand prize and the garbage heap. Love is a spiritual root canal and the only thing that makes life worth living. Love is a little taste of always and a big bite of nothing. And love is everything in between these extremes.

Many of the things which can never be, often are.

Contradiction is the heart and soul of character and drama. You're always looking for it. I loved her so much I hit her; that's character. I loved her so much I hit her again; that's even more character.

An infinite personality is an infinite impossibility.

The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.

Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.

Infinity is a dreadfully poor place. They can never manage to make ends meet.

[A mathematician is a] scientist who can figure out anything except such simple things as squaring the circle and trisecting an angle.

From the first time he'd met her, he'd sensed an air of contradiction about her. She was very much a woman, but still retained a waiflike quality. She could be brash, and at times deliberately suggestive, yet she was painfully shy. She was incredibly easy to get along with, yet she had few friends. She was a talented artist in her own right, but so self-conscious about her work that she rarely completed a piece and preferred to work with other people's art and ideas.

Sometimes as human beings, we're so contradictory - we may say something or do something and completely contradict ourselves. That's what I'm learning to embrace in television - not knowing what's going to happen. I might make a specific choice for myself and then in the next episode the writers might write something that contradicts it.