He stood there unsteady in the cold, mumbling syllables which almost resolved into her name, as though he could recall, and summon back, a time before death entered the world, before accident, before magic, and before magic despaired, to become religion.

— William Gaddis

William Gaddis Quotes

I recall a most ingenious piece in a Wisconsin quarterly some years ago in which ‘The Recognitions’ ’ debt to ‘Ulysses’ was established in such minute detail I was doubtful of my own firm recollection of never having read ‘Ulysses.

— William Gaddis

The Australian sculptor who made leather sandals said that Beethoven’s duet for viola and cello sounded to him like two bulky women rummaging under a bed. Behind him a girl said, – Of course I like music, but not just to listen to.

— William Gaddis

A product would drop out of sight overnight without advertising, I don’t care what it is, a book or a brand of soap, it would drop out of sight. We’ve had the goddam Ages of Faith, we’ve had the goddam Age of Reason. This is the Age of Publicity.

— William Gaddis

I can’t imagine cutting my wrists in Pokheepsie.

— William Gaddis

Nevertheless, they boarded The Purdue Victory and sailed out of Boston harbor, provided for against all inclemencies but these they were leaving behind, and those disasters of such scope and fortuitous originality which Christian courts of law and insurance companies, humbly arguing ad hominem, define as acts of God.

— William Gaddis

All we’ve got left to protect here is a system that’s set up to promote the meanest possibilities in human nature and make them look good.

— William Gaddis

In this world, God must serve the Devil.

— William Gaddis

Most people are clever because they don’t know how to be honest.

— William Gaddis

Someone had already remarked that Bruckner had been Hitler’s favorite composer, someone else, that there was something wrong with any young person who really enjoyed the late Beethoven; someone had already confided that the soap business in America amounted to seven million dollars a year, someone else that advertising amounted to seven billion.

— William Gaddis

Suffer barbaric childhood to give and receive remorselessly; civilized age learns to protect what it has, to neither give nor accept freely, to trust it’s own mistrust above faith, and intriguing others above the innocent. Intrigue, after all, is rational, something the mind can sink it’s teeth into, and defeat it with the good digestion of reason, a hopeless prospect for the toothless heart, and God only knows what innocence will do next.

— William Gaddis

You and I doctor, on the beach.

— William Gaddis

It was in the Depot Tavern that he received condolences, accepted funerary offers of drink, and, when these recognitions were exhausted, he sank into the habit of talking familiarly about persons and places unknown to his cronies, so that several of them suspected him of reading.

— William Gaddis

Their pursuits were by now so mysterious to one another that neither showed surprise at anything the other did or said, each, in fact, depending more and more heavily on the other for encouragement, an arrangement somewhat similar to that magic formula of modern marriage, whose parties are encouraged by disapprobation and disinterest respectively.

— William Gaddis

You just can’t understand anything you can’t get your hands on, anything you can’t feel or see or, or count...

— William Gaddis

People who would soon be seen in New York reading French books were seen here reading Italian.

— William Gaddis

The lust of summer gone, the sun made its visits shorter and more uncertain, appearing to the city with that discomfited reserve that sense of duty of the lover who no longer loves.

— William Gaddis

He had, by now, the look of a man who was waiting for something which had happened long before.

— William Gaddis

What greater comfort does time afford, than the objects of terror re-encountered, and their fraudulence exposed in the flash of reason?

— William Gaddis

You can always see an ancient city better when it’s been bombed.

— William Gaddis

Sincerity becomes the honesty of people who cannot be honest with themselves.

— William Gaddis
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