Helen DeWitt > Quotes

“There is a strange taboo in our society against ending something merely because it is not pleasant-- life, love, a conversation, you name it, the etiquette is that you must begin in ignorance & persevere in the face of knowledge, & though I naturally believe that this is profoundly wrong it's not nice to go around constantly offending people.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“The master swordsman isn't interested in killing people. He only wants to perfect his art.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark. There are people who think death a fate worse than boredom.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“I didn't want to go to sleep knowing I would just wake up in the morning.”
― Helen DeWitt

“I once read somewhere that Sean Connery left school at the age of 13 and later went on to read Proust and Finnegans Wake and I keep expecting to meet an enthusiastic school leaver on the train, the type of person who only ever reads something because it is marvellous (and so hated school). Unfortunately the enthusiastic school leavers are all minding their own business.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“When you play a piece of music there are so many different ways you could play it. You keep asking yourself what if. You try this and you say what if and you try that. When you buy a CD you get one answer to the question. You never get the what if.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“I got home and I thought I should stop leading so aimless an existence. It is harder than you might think to stop leading an existence, & if you can't do that the only thing you can do is try to introduce an element of purposefulness....and though I might have to wait another 30 or 40 years for my body to join the non-sentient things in the world at least in the meantime it would be a less absolutely senseless sentience. OK.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“I wish you wouldn't say the first thing that comes into your head, Ludo. There is an obvious difference between someone who works within the technical limitations of his time which are beyond his control and someone who accepts without thinking limitations which are entirely within his own power to set aside.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“He only tells the story once but you see it from about 8 points of view, you have to pay attention the whole time to see whether something seems to be true or is just what somebody says is true.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“Here was a man who'd learned to write before he could think, a man who threw out logical fallacies like tacks behind a getaway car, and he always always always got away.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“If you’re a salesman, you have to deal with yourself the way you are. Not how you’d like to be.

If you don’t have what it takes, you can waste a lot of time asking yourself “How can I get what it takes?” The question you should be asking yourself is, “Is there something else that takes what I have to offer?” Because if there’s something you can succeed at, just the way you are, you won’t have to waste a lot of time trying to change yourself. Which you’re never going to be able to do, anyway.”
― Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods

“I thought suddenly Look. If Kambei had stopped recruiting when the first samurai didn’t work out a 205-minute masterpiece of modern cinema would have been over at minute 32.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure; all take their turns of retardation….Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance, said Sib, was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker’s mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualities.”
― Helen DeWitt , The Last Samurai

“Sometimes my mother did practice but one thing led to another and sometimes she did not. The advice of the homely man was something of a curse. She would not practice at all if she could not practice right so that gradually she played less and less and sometimes not at all.

I used to think that things might have been different. Gieseking never played a scale and Glenn Gould hardly practiced at all, they would just look at the score and think and think and think. If the homely man had said to go away and think this would have been every bit as revolutionary a concept for a Konigsberg. Perhaps he even thought that you had to think. But you can't show someone how to think in an hour; you can give someone an exercise to take away.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“If you were at school they would not let you read a book like this, they would keep you from reading it by involving you in sport.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“Yamamoto said he thought you had to be able to hear how something did not work as part of a bigger thing to hear how it did and it was precisely because people couldn't hear that that they were willing to let movements be taken out of pieces.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“You have to deal with people the way they are, not the way you'd like them to be.”
― Helen DeWitt

“The reason is that even in a fantasy there is nothing even remotely erotic about a toilet bowl. In fact, considered as an accoutrement to a sexual encounter, a toilet bowl is a real cold shower.”
― Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods

“New York offers hideous garments in an abundance rivaled only by Scotland. The shoes were inexplicable.)”
― Helen DeWitt, The English Understand Wool

“On the day of the party I walked down to Covent Garden at lunchtime to buy a dress, and on my way to Boules I thought I would just stop off for a moment at Books etc.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“I use the word “suit” because I am writing in English, but the French tailleur—she would naturally think of clothes in French—makes intelligible that one would travel from Marrakech to the Outer Hebrides to examine the work of a number of weavers, perhaps to establish a relationship with a weaver of real gifts. It makes intelligible that one would bring one’s daughter, so that she might develop an eye for excellence in the fabric, know the marks of workmanship of real quality, observe how one develops an understanding with a craftsman of talent. The word “suit,” I think, makes this look quite mad.”
― Helen DeWitt, The English Understand Wool

“He was a linguist, and therefore he had pushed the bounds of obstinacy well beyond anything that is conceivable to other men.”
― Helen DeWitt

“[...] and unfortunately most women did not seem to have the same urges. Or if they did, they wouldn't admit it. They probably didn't, anyway. But if they did they wouldn't admit it.”
― Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods

“Sometimes I rode the Circle Line reading a book on organic chemistry and sometimes I read Leave It to Psmith for the 20th or 21st time and sometimes I watched Jeremy Brett's marvellous grotesque Sherlock Holmes or of course Seven Samurai. I sometimes went out for Tennessee Fried Chicken.

Day followed day. A year went by.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“This is so bad for him. Hundreds of people saying wonderful marvellous far too young what a genius. It seems to me that it is does not take miraculous intelligence to master the simple fact that ’Οδυσσε‡ς is Odysseus, if you go on to master 5,000 similar simple facts you have only shown that you are a miracle of obstinacy.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“My mother practiced hours every day, hours as painful to hear as to play. At first everybody thought she would give in. Day followed day, and the terrible stumbling sounds went on for hours on end.

She did not know what else to do.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“Essentially the film is about the importance of rational thought. We should draw our conclusions from the evidence available rather than from hearsay and try not to be influenced by our preconceptions. We should strive to see what we can see for ourselves rather than what we would like to see.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“He liked I expect the idea of effortless excellence, and being unable to combine the two has settled for the one he could be sure of...”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“In her excitement at the idea of just walking out the door she had walked out the door without stopping to practice and without even her sheet music, and now she had nothing to play from and nothing prepared.

Some people might have been daunted by this setback. The Konigsbergs faced musical catastrophe on a daily basis, & their motto was: Never say die.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“His youngest sister, Linda, wanted to be a singer and she had now refused point-blank to go to secretarial college; his father had refused pointblank to let her study music. Linda had gone to the piano and begun to play Chopin’s Prelude No. 24 in D minor, a bitter piece of music which gains in tragic intensity when played 40 times in a row.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai