Donald Antrim > Quotes

“There is nothing more seductive — and dangerous — than being listened to.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“I hope that you will be faced with difficult choices and decisions, trials that won’t undo you, but that will drive you toward reflection and understanding. Trust that your fears will sometimes tell you about your desires. You will see that you can survive the terror that comes with growth and change, with vulnerability and risk.”
― Donald Antrim

“The simple question 'What color do you want to paint that upstairs room?' might, if we follow things to their logical conclusions, be stated: 'How do I live, knowing that I will one day die and leave you?”
― Donald Antrim

“We eat pancakes to escape loneliness, yet within moments we want nothing more than our freedom from ever having so much as thought about pancakes.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“We eat pancakes to escape loneliness, yet within moments we want nothing more than our freedom from ever having so much as thought about pancakes. Nothing can prevent us, after eating pancakes, from feeling the most awful regret. After eating pancakes, our great mission in life becomes the repudiation of the pancakes and everything served along with them, the bacon and the syrup and the sausage and coffee and jellies and jams. But these things are beneath mention, compared with the pancakes themselves. It is the pancake--Pancakes! Pancakes!--that we never learn to respect.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“Have you ever noticed?--people, no matter how beautiful or desirable, invariably will, if observed closely while going about their daily business of keeping alive, begin to seem like monsters.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“The problems in describing a person are essentially problems of knowing a person.”
― Donald Antrim, The Hundred Brothers

“One of the sad features of most close relationships is the decay of intimacy as a function of time, turmoil, and all the little misunderstandings that inevitably occur between people, leading them, year in and year out, toward the same tired conclusions: conversation falters; friendships fail.”
― Donald Antrim, The Hundred Brothers

“Parents seem to embrace, almost unquestioningly, this bizarre, superstitious belief in infant clairvoyance, as though their “innocent” offspring have access to deep truths lost to them, to the parents—lost to maturity, cynicism, compromise. It’s one of our most esteemed cultural archetypes: the Prescient Child.”
― Donald Antrim

“...my insides were ulcerous from coffee and terror.”
― Donald Antrim, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World

“Quando amiamo una persona che ci risulta peculiare, non è di regola la mera peculiarità a suscitare in noi un affetto più profondo; ci sentiamo anzi toccati da ciò che è condiviso e storico: una buona o cattiva famiglia, magari, l'infanzia piena d'amore e quella priva di amicizie, una madre sola o un padre che beve, il bisogno di solitudine e il terrore della solitudine, tutte quelle cose eccitanti e provvidenziali che costituiscono la base di ciò che chiamiamo, in mancanza di un termine migliore, personalità.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“I left the house at around midnight and crept up the driveway to the road. I wore canvas sneakers, athletic socks, safari shorts, a tee-shirt, and had the bright purple knapsack containing Jim's cold, hard foot, a garden trowel, a box of candles and matches to light them, a library copy of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, and some fig bars for a snack.”
― Donald Antrim

“As I grow longer in the tooth, I find myself shaking off for greater and greater stretches of time, and I always use this time to fret morosely about my health in general, and about the likelihood that a grave illness, conceivably located in the bladder region, will overtake me in the future, maybe imminently. In this way a pleasurable, natural act becomes the catalyst for somber reflections and an unnatural, incipient depression. So much of life follows this pattern exactly, I think, We begin to lose ourselves in a joyful or gratifying act - it can be a creature comfort or something complicatedly emotional like stimulating conversation or the solitary immersion in a poem, a beautiful landscape, or a work of art - and we forget, in the moment of serenity, all the pain and trouble of life. Until, quite suddenly, and as a rule, shockingly, this very forgetfulness, our fleeting holiday from care, becomes nothing more than another occasion to remember how truly infrequently happiness comes to us, and how likely we are to die in some hortible way. Then, disgusted with ourselves over our inability to enjoy life, we halt the pleasurable activity and move on, as speedily as we can, to other business.”
― Donald Antrim, The Hundred Brothers

“Let him hurl these pieces of toast like new and radical ideas that must be cast into the world. Pieces of toast like angry children who will hit us and upset us and change our ways of thinking and feeling.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“Human beings in stressful relationships will frequently behave in ways that contradict or even reverse their own most certain expectations.”
― Donald Antrim, The Hundred Brothers

“Gli esseri umani, nel loro narcisismo, paiono avere la necessità di ripetersi costantemente che vivono sull'orlo di una nuova, straordinaria epoca in cui la vergogna e le inibizioni saranno problemi del passato.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“Relationships are like powerful moods that people share.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“attachment theory, which predicts social competency and the ability to thrive as functions of nurturing early attachments, of bonding; and Erik Erikson, whose work suggests that the violation of the child’s trust leads to a life of increasingly perilous failures of trust; and D. W. Winnicott, the British pediatrician whose writings stress the importance of parental love, the ongoing connection between mother and child. All these authors describe the crucial role of touch, and of the family setting as a place of safety and security.”
― Donald Antrim, One Friday in April: A Story of Suicide and Survival

“They were children of parents who’d acted grotesquely, some might say violently, toward them, even when they were fairly little, and when, in their early thirties, they met and began sharing confidences, their discovery of this common ground—for that was how she thought of it—seemed to her a great, welcome solace. At last! she thought more than once during the weeks and months after they’d started going to bed together—always at friends’ places, because they were both in transitional periods and didn’t have anywhere comfortably private; she was saving money by sleeping on a foldout sofa in the living room of a one-bedroom apartment in the East Twenties that she shared with her friend Susan, while he, also recently forced to cut expenses, was installed uptown in a rented room in the apartment of an older, intimidating former co-worker, also named Susan. At last! Jennifer said to herself many times before falling asleep after sex in some friend’s or friend of a friend’s freshly changed bed. Then she would squeeze his hand.”
― Donald Antrim, The Emerald Light in the Air

“Der Fuß war beerdigt, ich war groggy und mein Kaffee war kalt.”
― Donald Antrim

“Ritengo piuttosto che l'osservanza religiosa sia perlopiù un modo di rappresentare la vita quotidiana per ciò che realmente, nell'esperienza di molti, è: un cammino di fallimenti significativi.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“Choice, with its inevitable invitations to loss, is always such a trial.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“Il mio buonumore non durò. Temo di non essere incline a un atteggiamento allegro o spensierato.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“What is a pancake? Cooked batter, covered in sugar and butter. It is food. But it is not as food, not as sustenance that we crave the pancake. No, the pancake, or flapjack if you will, is a childish pleasure; smothered in syrup, buried beneath ice cream, the pancake symbolises our escape from respectability, eating as a form of infantile play. The environments where pancakes are served and consumed are, in this context, special playrooms for a public ravenous for sweetness, that delirious sweetness of long-ago breakfasts made by mother, sweetness of our infancy and our great, lost, toddler’s omnipotence. Look around. Notice, if you will, these lighting fixtures suspended from the ceiling like pretty mobiles over a crib. Notice the indestructible plastic orange seating materials designed to repel spills and stains. Notice these menus that unfold like colorful, laminated boards in those games we once played on rainy days at home, those unforgettable indoor days when we felt safe and warm, when we knew ourselves, absolutely, to be loved. We come to the Pancake House because we are hungry. We call out in our hearts to our mothers, and it is the Pancake House that answers. The Pancake House holds us! The Pancake House restores us to beloved infancy! The Pancake House is our mother in this motherless world!”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“Readers of symbols are forever at the mercy of desire.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“Ci avete mai fatto caso? Le persone, per quanto belle o desiderabili, immancabilmente, se osservate da vicino mentre sono intente ai gesti della quotidiana sopravvivenza, cominciano a sembrare mostri.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist

“I think most observance is really more a way of conceptualizing day-to-day life as what it actually is for many people, a progress of meaningful failures.”
― Donald Antrim, The Verificationist