Robert Coover > Quotes

“We need myths to get by. We need story; otherwise the tremendous randomness of experience overwhelms us. Story is what penetrates.”
― Robert Coover

“I learned my realism from guys like Kafka.”
― Robert Coover

“Black holes are the seductive dragons of the universe, outwardly quiescent yet violent at the heart, uncanny, hostile, primeval, emitting a negative radiance that draws all toward them, gobbling up all who come too close. Once having entered the tumultuous orbit of a black hole, nothing can break away from its passionate but fatal embrace. Though cons of teasing play may be granted the doomed, ultimately play turns to prey and all are sucked haplessly―brilliantly aglow, true, but oh so briefly so―into the fire-breathing maw of oblivion. Black holes, which have no memory, are said to contain the earliest memories of the universe, and the most recent, too, while at the same time obliterating all memory by obliterating all its embodiments. Such paradoxes characterize these strange galactic monsters, for whom creation is destruction, death life, chaos order. And darkness illumination: for, as dragons are also called worms, so black hole are known as wormholes, offering a mystical and intimate pathway to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, thus bring light as they consume it.”
― Robert Coover, A Child Again

“Why we write.
Because art blows life into the lifeless, death into the deathless. Because art's lie is preferable, in truth, to life's beautiful terror. Because as time does not pass (nothing, as Beckett tells us, passes) it passes the time. Because Death, our mirthless master, is somehow amused by epitaphs. Because epitaphs well struck give Death, our vorcious master, heartburn. Because fiction imitates life's beauty, thereby inventing the beauty life lacks. Because fiction is the best position, at once exotic and familiar, for fucking the world. Because fiction, mediating paradox, celebrates it. Because fiction, mothered by love, loves love as a mother might her unloving child. Because fiction speaks, hopelessly, beautifully, as the world speaks. Because God, created in the storyteller's image, can be destroyed only by its maker. Because in its perversity, art harmonizes the disharmonious, and because in its profanity, fiction sanctifies life. Because, in its terrible isolation, writing is a path to brotherhood. Because in the beginning was the gesture and in the end the come, as well in between what we have are words. Because of all arts, only fiction can unmake the myths that unman men. Because of its endearing futility, its outrageous pretentions. Because the pen, though short, casts a long shadow upon (it must be said) no surface. Because the world is reinvented every day and this is how it is done. Because there is nothing new under the sun except its expression. Because truth, that illusive joker, hides himself in fictions and must therefore be sought there. Because writing, in all spaces unimaginable vastness, is still the greatest adventure of all. And because, alas, what else?”
― Robert Coover

“Language is the square hole we keep trying to jam the round peg of life into. It's the most insane thing we do.”
― Robert Coover, Gerald's Party

“The superhero, his underwear bagging at the seat and knees, is just a country boy at heart, tutored to perceive all human action as good or bad, orderly or dynamic, and so doesn't know whether to shit or fly.”
― Robert Coover, A Night at the Movies, Or, You Must Remember This: Fictions

“When you're living with a mob of other people, it's hard not to fall into thinking like as they do, and then you ain't YOU no more.”
― Robert Coover

“People, fearing their own extinction, are willing to accept and perpetuate hand-me-down answers to the meaning of life and death; and, fearing a weakening of the tribal structures that sustain them, reinforce with their tales the conventional notions of justice, freedom, law and order, nature, family, etc. The writer, lone rider, has the power, if not always the skills, wisdom, or desire, to disturb this false contentment.”
― Robert Coover

“I spoke of the tragic illusion of perpetuity, but, no, my friends, it is a comic one. The ludicrous plot in which we are all trapped. The ancient Greeks referred to plot as mythos, attributing the random drift of human affairs to some sort of unknowable but glimpsable divine motion, attempting to attach a certain grandeur to it, the delusion of meaning. But we are characters who do not exist, in a story composed by no one from nothing. Can anything be more pitiable? No wonder we all are grieving.”
― Robert Coover

“Oh, he shouldn't be surprised, he's a Marxist and has nothing but contempt for the bourgeois capitalist press, yet paradoxically he is also somehow an Americanist and a believer in Science and Freedom and History and Reason, and it dismays him to see cruelty politely concealed in data, madness taken for granted and even honored, truth buried away and rotting in all that ex cathedra trivia--my God! something terrible is about to happen, and they have time to editorialize on mustaches, advertise pink cigarettes for weddings, and report on a lost parakeet! Ah, sometimes he just wants to ram the goddamn thing with his head in an all-out frontal attack, wants to destroy all this so-called history so that history can start again.”
― Robert Coover, The Public Burning

“...'Well, I think of you as a straight shooter, Sheriff, but one who can't stop lustin' after the goddamn ineffable.'
"She said that, hunh?"
"Yup."
"Shitfire, Sheriff, what'd you do?"
"Well, I shot her.”
― Robert Coover, A Night at the Movies, Or, You Must Remember This: Fictions

“And so, finally, he’d found his way back to baseball. Nothing like it really. Not the actual game so much—to tell the truth, real baseball bored him—but rather the records, the statistics, the peculiar balances between individual and team, offense and defense, strategy and luck, accident and pattern, power and intelligence. And no other activity in the world had so precise and comprehensive a history, so specific an ethic, and at the same time, strange as it seemed, so much ultimate mystery.”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association

“Bottom half of the seventh, Brock's boy had made it through another inning unscratched, one! two! three! Twenty-one down and just six outs to go! and Henry's heart was racing, he was sweating with relief and tension all at once, unable to sit, unable to think, in there, with them! Oh yes, boys, it was on! ”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

“Their wedding night was in all truth a thing of beauty: the splendor of the celebrations, the hushed intimacy of a private walk under the cryptic light of a large moon, the unexpected delight discovered in the reflection of a candle's flicker in a decanter of aged wine, finally the silent weeping in each other's arms through a night that seemed infinite in its innumerable dimensions.”
― Robert Coover, Pricksongs and Descants

“What we got is NOW, Huck, and now is forever. Until it ain't. So, you can't worry over nothing except putting off the end a your story as long as you can, and finishing it with a bang.”
― Robert Coover, Huck Out West

“Strange, the impact of History, the grip it had on us, yet it was nothing but words. Accidental accretions for the most part, leaving most of the story out. We have not yet begun to explore the true power of the Word, I thought. What if we broke all the rules, played games with the evidence, manipulated language itself, made History a partisan ally? Of course, the Phantom was already onto this, wasn't he? Ahead of us again. What were his dialectical machinations if not the dissolution of the natural limits of language, the conscious invention of a space, a spooky artificial no-man's land, between logical alternatives. I loved to debate both sides of any issue, but thinking about that strange space in between made me sweat. Paradox was one thing I hated more than psychiatrists and lady journalists.”
― robert coover, The Public Burning

“Message of the Legalists: without law, power lost its shape.”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association

“Le piccole cose di ogni giorno, le sue banali mansioni, pensa mentre si prepara ai compiti mattutini, le forniranno tutto ciò di cui ha bisogno, spazio per negare se stessa, una strada per avvicinarla quotidianamente a Dio.”
― Robert Coover, Spanking the Maid

“No matter how much sunlight and fresh air she lets in, there’s always this dark little pocket of lingering night which she has to uncover.”
― Robert Coover, Spanking the Maid

“She made them all laugh and forget for a moment that they were dying men.”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association

“History my god. An incurable diarrhea of dead immortals.”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association

“Who--Whoo--Whoop! Who'll come gouge with me? Who'll come bite with me? Rowff--Yough--Snort--YAHOO! In the name of the great Jehova and the Continental Congress, I have passed the Rubicon--swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish, I'm in fer a fight, I'll go my death on a fight, and with a firm reliance on the pertection of divine protestants, a fight I must have, or else I'll have to be salted down to save me from spilin'! You hear me over thar, you washed-up varmints? This is the hope of the world talkin' to you! I am Sam Slick the Yankee Peddler….”
― Robert Coover, The Public Burning

“In a sense, omnipotence is a form of impotence.”
― Robert Coover

“¿Qué quiere decir felices por siempre jamás, después de todo, sino una caída en lo ordinario, en la debilidad humana, acumulando desesperación, una caída de muerte?”
― Robert Coover, Zarzarrosa

“American baseball, by luck, trial, and error, and since the famous playing rules council of 1889, had struck on an almost perfect balance between offense and defense, and it was that balance, in fact, that and the accountability—the beauty of the records system which found a place to keep forever each least action—that had led Henry to baseball as his final great project.”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association

“Maybe it all went back to the days when games were decided, not by the best score in nine innings, but by the first team to score twenty-one runs”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association

“It’s not even a lesson. It’s just what it is.” Damon holds the baseball up between them. It is hard and white and alive in the sun.”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association

“In a way, Sandy did them a disservice, provided them with dreams and legends that blocked off their perception of the truth.”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association

“War seemed to be a must for every generation. A pageant to fortify the tribal spirit. A columnist plumped for bloodless war through the space race. Henry sympathized with the man, but it could never work. Mere abstraction. People needed casualty lists, territory footage won and lost, bounded sets with strategies and payoff functions, supply and communication routes disrupted or restored, tonnage totals, and deaths, downed planes, and prisoners socked away like a hoard of calculable runs scored. Besides, war was available to everybody, the space race to few: war was a kind of whorehouse for mass release of moonlust. Lunacy: anyway, he sure wasn't inventing it.”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

“And perhaps that was why—the tenacious faith in the residual magic of language—this monument [The New York Times] was erected in the first place: that effort to reconstruct with words and iconography each fleeting day in the hope of discovering some pattern, some coherence, some meaningful dialogue with time. But so enormous a shrine is it, so prodigious a task just to keep the translation of gesture into language flowing, that all consciousness of any intended search for transcendence must long ago have disappeared and been forgotten, leaving all visionary speculations to the passing pilgrim.”
― Robert Coover, The Public Burning