Sometimes looking so hard can make one blind.
—William Wharton
What we all tend to complain about most in other people are those things we don’t like about ourselves.
—William Wharton
People can’t fly because they don’t believe they can. If nobody ever showed people they could swim, everybody’d drown if they were dropped into the water.
—William Wharton
Things come apart much easier than they go together.
—William Wharton
He’s convinced most human adults do not know how to play anymore and that playing is one of the best ways to think. Franky finds children, by far, much more pleasant and intelligent than most adults, but they are easily ruined by their families, schools, and society. He says one of the ways they are ruined is by being forced to think of all the tasks that need to be done as work, not as play. It takes the joy out of living.
—William Wharton
Love is a combination of admiration, respect, and passion. If you have one of those going, that’s par for the course. If you have two, you aren’t quite world class but you’re close. If you have all three, then you don’t need to die; you’re already in heaven.
—William Wharton
Not many people are interested in what somebody else is thinking, or what they have to say. The best you can hope for is they’ll listen to you just so you’ll have to listen to them.
—William Wharton
Movement is most of what a bird is. When they’re dead, they’re only feathers and air.
—William Wharton
Before you know it, if you’re not careful, you can get to feeling sorry for everybody and there’s nobody left to hate.
—William Wharton
When brought to meaning, all importance becomes small, as in death, all life seems nothing. Knowing is destroyed by thinking, not destroyed but sterilized; distilled into knowledge. Thinking, the processing of knowing to knowledge.
—William Wharton
There’s no end to the absurd things people will do trying to make life mean something.
—William Wharton
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Lloyd Alexander American Writer
- Russell Hoban American Author
- James Salter American Fiction Writer
- Sidney Sheldon American Novelist, Screenwriter
- Frederik Pohl American Author
- John Irving American Novelist
- Don DeLillo American Author
- Peter Matthiessen American Naturalist, Novelist
- Charles R. Johnson American Author
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