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The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis QUOTES

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis QUOTES

1 " Art is not in some far-off place. "

― Lydia Davis , The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

2 " I can talk for a long time only when it's about something boring. "

― Lydia Davis , The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

3 " Like a tropical storm, I, too, may one day become ‘better organized. "

― Lydia Davis , The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

4 " I looked like a woman in glasses, but I had dreams of leading a very different kind of life, the life of a woman who would not wear glasses, the kind of woman I saw from a distance now and then in a bar. "

― Lydia Davis , The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

5 " Nearly every morning, a certain woman in our community comes running out of her house with her face white and her overcoat flapping wildly. She cries out, "Emergency, emergency," and one of us runs to her and holds her until her fears are calmed. We know she is making it up; nothing is has really happened to her. But we understand, because there is hardly one of us who has no been moved at some time to do just what she has done, and every time, it has taken all our strength, and even the strength of our friends and families, too, to keep us quiet. "

― Lydia Davis , The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

6 " So the question really is, Why doesn't that pain make you say, I won't do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don't. "

― Lydia Davis , The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

7 " The Outing

An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat stones, a cry of anger on the steep bank of dirt, a weeping among the bushes. "

― Lydia Davis , The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

8 " it occurs to me that I must not know altogether what I am, either, and that others know certain things about me better than I do, though I think I ought to know all there is to know and I proceed as if I do. Even once I see this, however, I have no choice but to continue to proceed as if I know altogether what I am, though I may also try to guess, from time to time, just what it is that others know that I do not know. "

― Lydia Davis , The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

9 " This was why she could not sleep. She could not say the day was over. She had no sense that any day was ever over. "

― Lydia Davis , The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

10 " There is his right leg over my right leg, my left leg over his right leg, his left arm under my back, my right arm around his head, his right arm across my chest, my left arm across his right arm, and my right hand stroking his right temple. Now it becomes difficult to tell what part of what body is actually mine and what part his. I rub his head as it lies pressed against mine, and I hear the strands of his hair chafing against his skull as though it is my own hair chafing against my own skull, as though I now hear with his ears, and from inside his head. "

― Lydia Davis , The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

11 " I guess you get to a point where you look at that pain as if it were in front of you three feet away lying in a box, an open box, in a window somewhere. It's hard and cold, like a bar of metal. You just look at it there and say, Alright, I'll take it, I'll buy it. That's what it is. "

― Lydia Davis , The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

12 " The people in your happy memories have to be the same people who want to have you in their own happy memories. "

― Lydia Davis , The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

13 " His inconsistency. His inability to finish anything. His sudden terrifying feelings that nothing he did mattered. His realizations that what went on in the outside world had more substance than anything in his life. "

― Lydia Davis , The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

14 " But at the time I had that strange confidence, born of watching a good movie, that I could be something different from what I was... "

― Lydia Davis , The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

15 " The moment when a limit is reached, when there is nothing ahead but darkness: something comes in to help that is not real. Another way all this is like madness: a mad person not helped out of his trouble by anything real begins to trust what is not real because it helps him and he needs it because real things continue not to help him. "

― Lydia Davis , The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

16 " She can't say to herself that it is really over, even though anyone else would say it was over, since he has moved to another city, hasn't been in touch with her in more than a year, and is married to another woman. "

― Lydia Davis , The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

17 " Not a man of habits, though he wished to be, "

― Lydia Davis , The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

18 " I attempt all day, at work, not to think about what lies ahead, but this costs me so much effort that there is nothing left for my work. I handle telephone calls so badly that after a while the switchboard operator refuses to connect me. So I had better say to myself, Go ahead and polish the silverware beautifully, then lay it out ready on the sideboard and be done with it. Because I polish it in my mind all day long—this is what torments me (and doesn't clean the silver). "

― Lydia Davis , The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

19 " At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child. "

― Lydia Davis , The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

20 " They Take Turns Using a Word They Like “It’s extraordinary,” says one woman. "

― Lydia Davis , The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis