Mark Bare > Mark's Quotes

“Why do you treat me as they do, as though I were exactly what I want to be. Why do we treat people that way?”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

“Nobody knew how to be what they were right. ”
― John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse

“I'll tell you why yes, because why people lie is, because when people stop lying you know they've stopped caring.”
― William Gaddis, Carpenter's Gothic

“We are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
― Carson McCullers

“As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. (...) You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert.”
― Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch

“Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Correction

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
― J. D. Salinger

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”
― Hannah Arendt

“They don't understand it. They're not old enough to know the first instinct of irritation should be avoided in order to keep an open mind.”
― Amelia Gray, Museum of the Weird

“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“The only true paradise is paradise lost”
― Marcel Proust

“If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.”
― Pablo Picasso

“People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life.”
― Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch

“It's so nice to know where you're going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy

“Do you believe in a future everlasting life?

No, not in a future everlasting but in an everlasting life here. There are moments, you reach moments, and time comes to a sudden stop, and it will become eternal.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons

“Substances start out being so magically great, so much the interior jigsaw's missing piece, that at the start you just know, deep in your gut, that they'll never let you down; you just know it. But they do. And then this goofy slapdash anarchic system of low-rent gatherings and corny slogans and saccharin grins and hideous coffee is so lame you just know there's no way it could ever possibly work except for the utterest morons...and then Gately seems to find out AA turns out to be the very loyal friend he thought he'd had and then lost, when you Came In.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Today our unsophisticated cameras record in their own way our hastily assembled and painted world.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading

“Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people...”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“What matters is whether we want to lie or to tell the truth and write the truth, even though it never can be the truth and never is the truth.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Gathering Evidence

“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“I was not unhappy, except one day at a time.”
― Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, Part 2

“Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.”
― William Faulkner

“When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once…”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I'm not a poet and I'm not a nature lover and I'm not an Anarchist. I am, thank God, absolutely nothing.”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“So, reader, should you ever find yourself writing about the world, take care not to nibble at the many tempting symbols she sets squarely in your path, or you'll be baited into saying things you don't really mean, and offending the people you want most to entertain. Develop, if you can, the technique of the pall bearers and myself: smile, to be sure -- for fucking dogs are truly funny -- but walk on and say nothing, as though you hadn't noticed.”
― John Barth, The Floating Opera / The End of the Road