Duncker Quotes & Sayings

Yeah, I love being famous. It's almost like being white, y'know? — Chris Rock

I stared at the changing patterns on the back of his white shirt as he moved under the trees. — Patricia Duncker

But ... if it's so awful and difficult who not try to become a group? Be accepted?
He glittered at me for a moment, then said, I would rather be mad. — Patricia Duncker

And that is the loneliness of seeing a different world from that of the people around you. Their lives remain remote from yours. You can see the gulf and they can't. — Patricia Duncker

They were from different generations, culture, nations. But even these things did not divide them so much as their separate conceptions of what it meant to be a woman. — Patricia Duncker

I hold those wise who know how to be happy. — Ninon De L'Enclos

We judge ourselves by our good intentions, but we're judged by our last word. — Tom Selleck

Love is not feeling, child, nor even the passion of lovers, which always seeks only its own gratification. It is the act of caring, of giving, the act of protecting the weak, the helpless, the imprisoned and the desperate. Love is the hand raised in defence. You cannot love and keep your hands clean. — Patricia Duncker

Madness and passion have always been interchangeable. Throughout the entire western literary tradition. Madness is an abundance of existence. Madness is a way of asking difficult questions. What did he mean, the powerless tyrant king? O Fool, I shall go mad.
Maybe madness is the excess of possibility, ... And writingis about reducing possibility to ne idea, one book, one sentence, one word. Madness is a form of self-expression. It is the opposite of creativity. You cannot make anything that can be separated from yourself if you are mad. And yet, look at Rimbaud
and your wonderful Christopher Smart. But don't harbour any romantic ideas about what it means to be mad. My language was my protection, my guarantee against madness and when there was no one to listen my language vanished along with my reader. — Patricia Duncker

He's threatening to breed polo ponies, but he's always been a man of great ideas, but little action, so I don't suppose he will. — Rosamunde Pilcher

It's weird sometimes to have people not see me or see what I do. — Esperanza Spalding

The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated. — Patricia Duncker

Vespertine Mink? Is that you?"
The girl on the roof opposite lowered her lanterns and called back, "Pamela Roe?"
"Yeah, let's both let that sink in for a minute, it's a doozy! — Lia Habel

Freedom: both so priceless and so expensive. — Patricia Duncker

Life presents itself as a continual deception, in small matters as well as in great. If it has promised, it does not keep its word, unless to show how little desirable the desired object was; hence we are deluded now by hope, now by what was hoped for. If it has given, it did so in order to take. The enchantment of distance shows us paradises that vanish like optical illusions, when we have allowed ourselves to be fooled by them. Accordingly, happiness lies always in the future, or else in the past, and the present may be compared to a small dark cloud driven by the wind over the sunny plain; in front of and behind the cloud everything is bright, only it itself always casts a shadow. Consequently, the present is always inadequate, but the future is uncertain, and the past irrecoverable. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Well
there are two kinds of loneliness, aren't there? There's the loneliness of absolute solitude
the physical fact of living alone, working alone, as I have always done. This need not be painful. For many writers it's necessary. Others need a female staff of family servants to type their bloody books and keep the their egos afloat. Being alone for most of the day means that you listen to different rhythms, which are not determined by other people. I think it's better so. But there is another kind of loneliness which is terrible to endure ... And that is the loneliness of seeing a different world from that of the people around you. Their lives remain remote from yours. You can see the gulf and they can't. You live among them. They walk on earth. You walk on glass. They reassure themselves with conformity, with carefully constructed resemblances. You are masked, aware of your absolute difference. — Patricia Duncker

Both the Winter and the Summer Solstices are expressions of love. They show us the opposition of light and dark, expansion and contraction, that characterize our experiences in the Earth school so that we can recognize our options as we move through our lives. — Gary Zukav

All writers are, somewhere or other, mad. Not les grands fous, like Rimbaud, but mad, yes, mad. Because we do not believe in the stability of reality. We know that it can fragment, like a sheet of glass or a car's windscreen. but we also know that reality can be invented, reordered, constructed, remade. Writing is, in itself, an act of violence perpetrated against reality. — Patricia Duncker

Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene - in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses. — Susan Sontag

Every thing to be true must become a religion. — Oscar Wilde

You write your first novel with the desperation of the damned. You're afraid that you'll never write anything else, ever again. — Patricia Duncker

Man is everywhere still in chains. — Herbert Read

Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination. — Andrea Dworkin

What people think and believe and plan are all very important, but what they do is the thing that counts most. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

You can say anything, anything, if it is beautifully said. — Patricia Duncker

We articulate our fears, like children in the dark, giving them names in order to tame them. — Patricia Duncker

The love between writer and a reader is never celebrated. It can never be proved to exist. But he was the man I loved most. He was the reader for whom I wrote.
That's what my writing was. Messages in bottles. — Patricia Duncker

People are at their happiest if they are true to themselves. I think that applies to their chosen profession, friends and relationships. It goes for your health too. If you are true to yourself, it seems to me everything should work out pretty well. — Bebe Neuwirth

Suddenly, she employed those very English weapons: devious good manners and a rapid change of subject. — Patricia Duncker

I look at it somewhat as a way - when you learn juggling, what you learn is how to feel with your eyes and see with your hands because you're not looking at your hands, you're looking at where the balls are, or you're looking at the audience. — Michael Moschen