43 Quotes by David Markson

One can very agreeably ignore a rain by walking in it.In fact it is when one allows a rain to prevent one from walking in it that one is failing to ignore it. Surely by saying, dear me, I will get soaked through and through if I walk in this rain, for instance, one is in no way ignoring the rain.

...Troy itself was disappointingly small. Like little more than your ordinary city block and a few stories in height, practically.Although now that I remember, everything in William Shakespeare's house at Stratford-on-Avon was astonishingly tiny, too. As if only imaginary people had lived there then.Or perhaps it is only the past itself, which is always smaller than one had believed.

Once, I had a dream of fame. Generally, even then, I was lonely.

I still notice the burned house, mornings, when I walk along the beach. "Well, obviously I do not notice the house. What I notice is what remains of the house. One is still prone to think of a house as a house, however, even if there is not remarkably much left of it.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

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.

Petrarch sometimes wrote letters to long-dead authors. He was also a dedicated hunter of classic manuscripts. Once, after discovering some previously unknown works of Cicero, he wrote Cicero the news.

Unquestionably it would have been Mary Magdalene who did the dishes at the Last Supper.Concluded Marguerite Yourcenar.

How miraculous it was, noted Diogenes, that whenever one felt that sort of urge, one could readily masturbate. But conversely how disheartening that one could not simply rub one’s stomach when hungry.