>“I know you, I know you. You're the only serious person in the room, aren't you, the only one who understands, and you can prove it by the fact that you've never finished a single thing in your life. You're the only well-educated person, because you never went to college, and you resent education, you resent social ease, you resent good manners, you resent success, you resent any kind of success, you resent God, you resent Christ, you resent thousand-dollar bills, you resent Christmas, by God, you resent happiness, you resent happiness itself, because none of that's real. What is real, then? Nothing's real to you that isn't part of your own past, real life, a swamp of failures, of social, sexual, financial, personal...spiritual failure. Real life. You poor bastard. You don't know what real life is, you've never been near it. All you have is a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! You poor bastard.”
Most based of 20th century american writers. Its one of the few books which can still give me hope. The same people have always been around, you just have to hear from more of them these days.
Yes, I'll kill myself. This time, I'll really do it. I'm not a coward, I know I'm not a coward, I can't be a coward. I'll finish something with my own hands, goddamnit.
Nicholas Gray
The Recognitions c. 1955
Brayden Thomas
based anselm poster
Christopher Adams
>“Say a word, say a thousand to me on the telephone and I shall choose the wrong one to cling to as though you had said it after long deliberation when only I provoked it from you, I will cling to it from among a thousand, to be provoked and hurl it back with something I mean no more than you meant that, something for you to cling to and retreat clinging to.”
an american prophet
Jason Bell
I've been putting off reading The Recognitions for so long, I feel guilty about it.
Hudson Gray
williamgaddis.org/ this site (one of the oldest of its kinds) makes it easier the wall of references quote and allusions
Henry Wood
Thanks, I'll bookmark it for future reference.
Connor Peterson
Stephen (aka Wyatt aka "my protag doesnt need a name for more than half the book") knew what he was about. The mummy shit with him and the old forger that's responsible for his mothers death is kino.
Blake Morales
Or shit, was that Esme... Or shit, was it Anselm? wait no, he castrated himself
Jackson Cooper
>tfw went to college
Phew, that lets me off the hook. That would be literally me otherwise.
Eli Rivera
The colleges he's talking about (pre-1955) no longer exist user.
Matthew Garcia
>At least there's one quality in a paragraph-long list that doesn't apply to me. That means I'm a totally different sort of person. Right, guys? G-guys?
Parker Rogers
Kek
Hudson Collins
You know the quote in OP is full of irony, right?
Liam Lopez
So are the posts you're quoting.
Carter Ross
>That's why most writing now, if you read it they go on one two three four and tell you what happened like newspaper accounts, no adjectives, no long sentences, no tricks they pretend, and they finally believe that they really believe that the way they saw it is the way it is ... it never takes your breath away, telling you things you already know, laying everything out flat, as though the terms and the time, and the nature and the movement of everything were secrets of the same magnitude. They write for people who read with the surface of their minds, people with reading habits that make the smallest demands on them, people brought up reading for facts, who know what's going to come next and want to know what's coming next, and get angry at surprises. Clarity's essential, and detail, no fake mysticism, the facts are bad enough.
Landon Davis
>went 2 kollege >use heron to make mi happi >have a really cool car (1997 honda civic) >stuck my peepee in a girl once
OPs quote is from a super minor character advertiser (Don Draper-esk) at a Christmas party as he shreds into some hippy literary critic and his psuedo-intellectual bullshit that was leaking into NYC life at the time.
All gaddis major social criticism came in the background while the inscrutable main characters made one nonsensical decision after another.
