A Quote by Donald Barthelme

Some people', Miss R. said,'run to conceits or wisdom but I hold to the hard, brown, nutlike word. I might point out that there is enough aesthetic excitement here to satisfy anyone but a damned fool.
If you send a damned fool to St. Louis, and you don't tell them he's a damned fool, they'll never find out.
Brown Penny I WHISPERED, 'I am too young,' And then, 'I am old enough'; Wherefore I threw a penny To find out if I might love. 'Go and love, go and love, young man, If the lady be young and fair.' Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny, I am looped in the loops of her hair. O love is the crooked thing, There is nobody wise enough To find out all that is in it, For he would be thinking of love Till the stars had run away And the shadows eaten the moon. Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny, One cannot begin it too soon.
The important point is Brexiteers said that this would be easy, that we could leave and enter a post-Brexit nirvana, a land of milk and honey that will satisfy their ideological dogma and make the people happy. Sadly, this deluded dream has run out of steam.
The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only means that people are capable of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty and to exercise it openly and fairly can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run. As Lincoln observed, you can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
I can see,’ Miss Emily said, ‘that it might look as though you were simply pawns in a game. It can certainly be looked at like that. But think of it. You were lucky pawns. There was a certain climate and now it’s gone. You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in the world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.’ ‘It might be just some trend that came and went,’ I said. ‘But for us, it’s our life.
You have heretofore found out, by my teachings, that man is a fool; you are now aware that woman is a damned fool.
Hoaxes are nothing new. News media isn't hard to fool. It's fun to fool and people like to mess with people. It all goes to show you that we're not all that hard to fool. I think we should just accept that and trust people anyway.
So much happened (in 1968) it was hard to keep up with everything. We had Denny McLain's thirty-one victories, Gates Brown's great pinch-hitting in the clutch, Tom Matchick's home run to beat Baltimore in the ninth inning, then Daryl Patterson striking out the side to beat them in the ninth. Excitement every day in the ballpark.
Raising interest rates might lead to some initial reductions in wealth by lowering asset prices, but it could also take a bite out of your paycheck and dampen your prospects of finding a job. It's a bit of damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Sex might satisfy, food might fuel, love might sustain, but without coffee, what is the point?
The most radical, audacious thing to think is that there might be some point to working hard and thinking hard and reading hard and writing hard and trying to be of service
There are some people who are always on the run, so much so that they find it hard to fit in the study of God's word.
I should be very sorry to see the United States holding anyone in confinement on account of any opinion that that person might hold. It is a fundamental tenet of our institutions that people have a right to believe what they want to believe and hold such opinions as they want to hold without having to answer to anyone for their private opinion.
The truth is that an intellectual life is available to almost anyone, almost anywhere, if they work hard enough and are given some kind of access point.
Never, however, do I take shortcuts. There is not path of least resistance in my training. What I do equates to hard manual labor, disciplined grunt work. Once you permit yourself to compromise, you fail yourself. You might be able to fool some people, but you can never fool yourself. Your toughest critic is the one you face every morning in the mirror.
No matter what you do, it can't be perfect. I told Jack White, 'If I'd 'a sung that song more'n twice, it might of sounded better.' He said, 'Well, it might not of. You might have took the spark out of it.' I don't know if he has a point or not. We'll find out.
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