David Markson famous quotes

03-17-2025

You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.
-- David Markson

#Sex #Reading #Two
What do any of us ever truly know?
-- David Markson
I also believe I met William Gaddis once. He did not look Italian.
-- David Markson

#Believe #Italian #Looks
In fact one frequently seemed to gather all sorts of similar information about subjects one had less than profound interest in.
-- David Markson

#Profound #Information #Facts
Can Protagonist think of a single film that interests him as much as the three-hundredth best book he ever read?
-- David Markson

#Book #Thinking #Three
Is T.S. Eliot the only poet one can think of who could have spent a year on his own in Paris at twenty-threeâ€”and managed to have no sexual encounter whatsoever?
-- David Markson

#Thinking #Years #Paris
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.
-- David Markson

#Piano #Play #Pieces
Once, I had a dream of fame. Generally, even then, I was lonely.
-- David Markson

#Dream #Lonely #Fame
Doubtless these are inconsequential perplexities. Still, inconsequential perplexities have now and again been known to become the fundamental mood of existence, one suspects.
-- David Markson

#Fundamentals #Mood #Existence
The morningâ€™s recollection of the emptiness of the day before. Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come.
-- David Markson

#Morning #Emptiness #Anticipation
Was it really some other person I was so anxious to discover...or was it only my own solitude that I could not abide?
-- David Markson

#Solitude #Anxious #Persons
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.
-- David Markson

#Storm #Ships #Language
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.
-- David Markson

#Life #Mad #Anxiety
Trying to imagine E. M. Forster, who found Ulysses indecorous, at a London performance of Lenny Bruceâ€”to which in fact he was once taken. Trying to imagine the same for a time-transported Nathaniel Hawthorneâ€”who during his first visit to Europe was even shocked by the profusion of naked statues.
-- David Markson

#Taken #Europe #Trying

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