Forty Stories

You came and fell upon me, I was sitting in the wicker chair. The wicker exclaimed as your weight fell upon me. You were light, I thought, and I thought how good it was of you to do this. We'd never touched before.

This is one of the most crucial things that the newcomer needs to know about Barthelme. Though his stuff is sometimes difficult to puncture, and sometimes difficult to follow, while you’re finding your way, he’s always grinning at you in a warm and very compassionate way. The reader gets the feeling that the author is a nice man. That he knows when he’s being difficult and when he’s full of shit. Knows how much of this and how much of that you can actually take. He differs from some of his contemporaries, and from many other forgers of new prose styles, in that he doesn’t ever give off the impression that he takes himself overseriously, and he seems genuinely to care whether or not his work is being read by you. He is a social writer. A writer who seems to be in the next room, waiting for you to finish and tell him what you thought.

Pia was chopping up an enormous cabbage, a cabbage big as a basketball. The cabbage was of an extraordinary size. It was a big cabbage. “That’s a big cabbage,” Edward said. “Big,” Pia said.

Be like Sindbad. Venture forth! Embosom the waves, let your shoes be sucked from your feet and your very trousers enticed by the frothing deep. The ambiguous sea awaits, I told them, marry it! There’s nothing out there, they said. Wrong, I said, absolutely wrong. There are waltzes, sword canes, and sea wrack dazzling to the eyes.

it reminds us that the sentence itself is a man-made object, not the one we wanted of course, but still a construction of man, a structure to be treasured for its weakness, as opposed to the strength of stones p

O art I won't hurt you if you don't hurt me.

I believe that what we do is, very often, a poor approximation of what we are—an imperfect manifestation of a much better totality.

- I tell you people lust for consummation. They see a shining dagger poised above a naked breast, they want it shoved in.

But a lot of people don't like things that are unearthly, the things of this earth are good enough for them, and they don't mind telling you so.

The combinatory agility of words,” he wrote in “Not-Knowing,” “the exponential generation of meaning once they’re allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven’t yet encountered.

The best way to live is by not knowing what will happen to you at the end of the day, when the sun goes down and the supper is to be cooked." -from "The Educational Experience