David Markson Quotes
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Once, somebody asked Robert Schumann to explain the meaning of a certain piece of music he had just played on the piano. What Robert Schumann did was sit back down at the piano and play the piece of music again.
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Doubtless these are inconsequential perplexities. Still, inconsequential perplexities have now and again been known to become the fundamental mood of existence, one suspects.
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Can Protagonist think of a single film that interests him as much as the three-hundredth best book he ever read?
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You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.
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What do any of us ever truly know?
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In fact one frequently seemed to gather all sorts of similar information about subjects one had less than profound interest in.
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Is T.S. Eliot the only poet one can think of who could have spent a year on his own in Paris at twenty-three—and managed to have no sexual encounter whatsoever?
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Once, I had a dream of fame. Generally, even then, I was lonely.
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Was it really some other person I was so anxious to discover...or was it only my own solitude that I could not abide?
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I also believe I met William Gaddis once. He did not look Italian.
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The morning’s recollection of the emptiness of the day before. Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come.
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You will say that I am old and mad, was what Michaelangelo wrote, but I answer that there is no better way of being sane and free from anxiety than by being mad.
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Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm. Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm. One's language is frequently imprecise in that manner, I have discovered.
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Trying to imagine E. M. Forster, who found Ulysses indecorous, at a London performance of Lenny Bruce—to which in fact he was once taken. Trying to imagine the same for a time-transported Nathaniel Hawthorne—who during his first visit to Europe was even shocked by the profusion of naked statues.
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