Gabriel

“Narrative is an open-ended invitation to ethical and poetical responsiveness. Storytelling invites us to become not just agents of our own lives, but narrators and readers as well. It shows us that the untold life is not worth living.
There will always be someone there to say, 'tell me a story', and someone there to respond. Were this not so, we would no longer be fully human.”
― Richard Kearney, On Stories

“-I'm reviewing it, the stooped man said, and started to plod off.
-You read it?
-No, he said over his shoulder, -but I know the son of a bitch who wrote it.”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

“I’d say go to hell, but I never want to see you again.”
― Mad Men, incorrectly attributed to Sylvia Plath

“Wyatt was, in fact, finding the Christian system suspect. Memory of his fourth birthday party still weighted in his mind. It had been planned cautiously by Aunt May, to the exact number of hats and favors and portions of cake. One guest, no friend to Wyatt (from a family “less fortunate than we are”), showed up with a staunchly party-bent brother. (Not only no friend: a week before he had challenged Wyatt through the fence behind the carriage barn with —Nyaa nyaa, suckinyerma’s ti-it-ty…) Wyatt was taken to a dark corner, where he later reckoned all Good works were conceived, and told that it was the Christian thing to surrender his portion. So he entered his fifth year hatless among crepe-paper festoons, silent amid snapping crackers, empty of Christian love for the uninvited who asked him why he wasn’t having any cake.”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions