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John Gardner Quotes

Total quotes: 13
“We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.”
— John Gardner, On Becoming A Novelist
Tagged: Books, Novels, Imagination, Best Reading Quotes, Words Become Images
“The old ram stands looking down over rockslides, stupidly triumphant.”
— John Gardner, Grendel
Tagged: First Line of Books, first lines of books, You Thought You Won But You Actually Lost
“I dreamed I awakened in a valley where no life stirred, no cry of a fox sparked up out of stillness; a night of ashes.”
— John Gardner, JASON AND MEDEIA
Tagged: first lines of books, Dreaming, Skies, Ashes, World of Ashes
“The cold night air is reality at last: indifferent to me as a stone face carved on a high cliff wall to show that the world is abandoned.”
— Grendel, Grendel
Tagged: Nature's Apathy, Night
“The painful realization came that he did not feel as guilty even about the murder as he felt about his betrayal of his calling. ”
— Peter Mickelsson, Mickelsson's Ghosts
Tagged: Conviction, Vocation
“The question is whether the Ideal exists in actuality or only in our clumsy, moment-by-moment emotions— continually shifting potential; in other words 'out there' or 'in here' or both: God's voice, so to speak, or the opinion, on a particular Tuesday, of some human— or both at once. Am I leaving things out?”
— Peter Mickelsson, Mickelsson's Ghosts
Tagged: Idealism, Ideals
“Locked in the deadly progression of moon and stars.”
— John Gardner, Grendel
Tagged: Fatalism, Our Existential Physics
“Sometimes the sordidness of his present existence, not to mention the stifling, clammy heat of the apartment his finances had forced him to take, on the third floor of an ugly old house on Binghamton’s West Side—‘ the nice part of town,’ everybody said (God have mercy on those who had to live in the bad parts)— made Peter Mickelsson clench his square yellow teeth in anger and once, in a moment of rage and frustration greater than usual, bring down the heel of his fist on the heavy old Goodwill oak table where his typewriter, papers, and books were laid out, or rather strewn. He’d intended to split the thing in two, though perhaps the intent was not quite conscious.”
— John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts
Tagged: Binghamton, first lines of books
“When they had fights about Ellen's playing around— a phrase that, inexplicably, filled him with rage— it always seemed later that it was not her infidelity that brought on the fights, nor his guilt at his own unconfessed infidelity, but the gin they'd drunk. It had seemed not in the real world, as real human beings, that they attacked each other, but as brightly painted puppet-like creatures in an eerie projection, a dream-world where blows (they had often come to blows— Mickelsson holding back, doing damage enough, Ellen laying in on him with everything she had, pitifully girlish, though sometimes he came out with a puffy face) had no force, whatever their violence, and words, whatever their viciousness, would prove hard to remember later. In the morning they would be careful of each other, as of people who've been wounded and will never again be whole.”
— John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts
Tagged: Relationships
“Her face was like a child's, not yet touched by the shadow of family deaths. Behind her there was a white, Spanish-looking building, large, spear-shaped fronds, and a wide, bright expanse of water. Sunlight fell everywhere, not least (one felt) in the young woman's heart. He had never seen anyone more beautiful, he thought; he was reminded of those French art films of the fifties. Staring at the face, he felt baffled, suddenly depressed. The Jessie of the picture was one he would never know, and childish, irrational as the feeling might be, he felt cheated, a little angry.”
— John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts
Tagged: Aging, Lost Time, Love, History of Faces
“He'd never in his life heard music so unearthly. Perhaps it was the shale of the mountainsides, or the breath of cold fog on the river; whatever the reason, the music, by the time it reached Mickelsson, seemed nothing that human voices could conceivably produce. If stones were to sing, taking their own natural harmonies, or if the restless spirits of dead animals were to cry out, this might be their sound.”
— John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts
Tagged: Music, Theology, Perfect Music
“It even crossed his mind, as he stood idly waiting, his hand resting on the wallpaper books, that maybe he ought to get a rifle. Why not? His father had taken him hunting as a boy; the memory rose in his mind with wonderful vividness— creeks, trees, sunlight, squirrels scampering along high, leafy branches, the sky bright blue, like the ceiling at his parents' church. He'd never been hunting since. Ellen had hated guns. Her irrational fear of them had gotten under his skin, her weird conviction— only now did he fully realize how weird it was— that Mickelsson was a man too dark-spirited and moody to be safe with a rifle in the house. He shook his head. Odd what a man could take for reasonable and natural, if the poison was slipped in subtly enough, over a long enough period of time.”
— John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts
Tagged: Relationships, Slowly Dying
“If music was studied, recreated or now-first-expressed emotion, why was he listening with such strained intensity, as if to learn some answer, solve some important life-riddle? Wasn't it the case, in fact, that he'd been listening all this while for the wrong thing entirely; that music— for that matter, all the arts—told one nothing at all, simply described things as they are, or were, or might be, simply named things as Adam was said to have named things in the garden except that it was the thing named? Was it the case, to put the idea more exactly, that music was nothing more than, as the formalists thought, one more expression of Nature's way, atomic orderliness, no more significant or meaningful— except for the fact that it was created by human beings and in public places flashed its complexity— than a jonquil, an elm tree, that it was simply one more particular thing in a crowded, gasping anarchy of things—itself, simply: meaningless and ultimately as worthless as a soup-spoon, or Donnie Matthews' foetus; or meaningless except in that, like the foetus, it might not have existed and someday would cease to exist?”
— Peter Mickelsson, Mickelsson's Ghosts
Tagged: Art, Liberal Arts, Meaning, Music
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