Bluebeard Quotes
"Everybody who is alive is a survivor, and everybody who is dead isn’t."
"A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up."
"If I work hard enough, by golly, I can do that, too!"
"All it caught was dead skin and toenails and hair which people long gone had left behind."
"You really are an artist, and you have to get out of here or you’ll shrivel up like a raisin."
"New York is just going to be a stopover for you."
"How good were those pictures of mine which Dan Gregory looked at so briefly before he shoved Marilee down the stairs?"
"Either his damaged brain believed that this was a literal truth, or he had come to the conclusion that all the brains he had operated on were basically just receivers of signals from someplace else."
"He said that all he'd been able to receive in his own head for the past twenty years was static and what sounded like weather reports in some foreign language he'd never heard before."
"And Mrs. Berman said, 'Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed.'"
"We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive."
"I want you to say that out loud and with just that degree of conviction anytime anyone has anything good to say about so-called modern art."
"I have thought hard about this, and any answer I give refers to me, too."
"Birth and death were even on that old piece of beaverboard Terry Kitchen sprayed at seeming random so long ago. I don’t know how he got them in there, and neither did he."
"All you have to do, my dear, is look at a million paintings, and then you can never be mistaken."
"I have had all I can stand of not taking myself seriously."
"The orgastic moment for me is when I hand a manuscript to my publisher and say, 'Here! I'm all through with it. I never want to see it again.'"
"But let’s forget me for the moment, and focus on the works of Gregory. They were truthful about material things, but they lied about time."
"The cook’s daughter laughed, and I asked her loftily what she thought was funny. She said, 'Everybody’s got the dropsies today.'"
"I think you’re scared to death of women," she said. "Me, too," said Celeste.
"What beauty! So unexpected and pure! So easy to achieve!"
"Same sort of happiness! Except that what Pollock did lacked that greatest of all crowd pleasers, which was human sacrifice."
"People think we’re in love," I said to her on a walk one day. And she said, "They’re right."
"You know the best part—walking around like this and feeling good about everything."
"‘Contentedly adrift in the cosmos,’ were you? That is a perfect description of a non-epiphany."
"Every branch of the service is claiming camouflage from the air as their specialty, even though it’s obviously the business of the Engineers."
"The whole point of war is to put women everywhere in that condition. It’s always men against women, with the men only pretending to fight among themselves."
"Women are so useless and unimaginative, aren’t they? All they ever think of planting in the dirt is the seed of something beautiful or edible."
"The only missile they can ever think of throwing at anybody is a ball or a bridal bouquet."
"The last conceivable thing a painter could do to a canvas, so you did it. Leave it to Americans to write, ‘The End.’"
"Let men come into my rotunda, and wherever they look at eye level let them receive no encouragement. Let the walls cry out: ‘The end! The end!’"
"Nobody else wanted those pictures at any price!"
"I considered hiring women and children to paint murals of the death camps and the bombing of Hiroshima and the planting of land mines, and maybe the burning of witches and the feeding of Christians to wild animals in olden times."
"We concluded that it was our clothing and grooming which were holding us back. This was a kind of joke."
"I didn’t realize that, but now that you mention it, it’s true."
"I was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation, my platoon was so good at camouflage."
"It’s a miracle he didn’t slash his wrists as well."
"My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things."
"I would hate to be responsible for what my meat does."
"You’re supposed to be thirty-four years old," she said. She herself was twenty-three!
"Too late—and much too risky for a family man. Wake up!" she said.
"If you love me, you’d have more faith in me as a painter," I said.
"You don’t have to do wild things, great big things, dangerous things that don’t have a chance," she said.
"Everything about life is a joke," I said. "Don’t you know that?"