75 Quotes by William Gaddis

Women get desperate, but they don't understand despair.

Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.

If we believe that love is weakness? And people resent it, because they think it’s an admission of weakness, they draw away from it… and that’s why you kill the thing you love, because it’s your weakness personified. If you kill it, you will your weakness before it kills you.

Holy things and holy places, out of mind under the cauterizing brilliance of the summer son, reared up now as the winter sun struck from the south, casting shadows coldly upon the avenues where the people followed and went in, wearing winter hearts on their sleeves for the plucking.

During the investigation, he tried a brief defense of his medical practice on the grounds that he had once assisted a vivisectionist in Tampa, Florida; and when this failed, he settled down to sullen grumbling about the Jews, earthly vanity, and quoted bits from Ecclesiastes, Alfonso Liguori, and Pope Pius IX, in answer to any accusatory question.

That fever had passed; but for the rest of his life it never left his eyes.

I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.

Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.