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David Shields Quotes

Total quotes: 26
“We are all so afraid. We are all so alone. We all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.”
— David Shields, How Literature Saved My Life
Tagged: Alone, Love, Sad
“The love that lasts the longest is the love that is never returned.”
— David Shields, Dead Languages
Tagged: Love, Unrequited Love
“If we're to understand Trump, we need to understand ourselves, American culture, and human nature. Trump is symptom, not cause.”
— David Shields, An Interview with David Shields
Tagged: Understanding Donald Trump
“Movies love to imply that the man and woman held each other all night long, but you can’t do it. You have to roll away.”
— David Shields, How Literature Saved My Life
Tagged: real love, Love
“I begin with a personal cultural and human cataclysm. Something I am obsessed with.”
— David Shields, David Shields on Writing, Process, and Latest Books
Tagged: Culture and Society, Writing & Expression
“When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful.”
— David Shields, War Is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict
Tagged: War, The Aestheticization of Violence
“The Greek word eros denotes 'want,' 'lack,' 'desire for that which is missing.' The lover wants what he doesn’t have.”
— David Shields, How Literature Saved My Life
Tagged: Word Orgins, Eros, Love
“The purpose of art is to transfer feeling from one person’s heart to another person’s heart.”
— David Shields, How Literature Saved My Life
Tagged: Purpose of Art, Art, My Heart To Your Heart, IWroteThis4You, 107 Of The Greatest Single Sentences In Literature, Perfect Sentences
“I know of nothing more difficult than knowing who you are and having the courage to share the reasons for the catastrophe of your character with the world.”
— David Shields, Reality Hunger (Vintage)
Tagged: Identity, Courage, character, Brave, Revealing Yourself
“There was a reason the church was the main cultural unifier in Western Europe: it had the best distribution network and the most mass-produced item— the Bible.”
— David Shields, Reality Hunger
Tagged: Communications, Medium, The Bible, The Printing Press
“Here, right now, this is gorgeous. Please let’s keep it so. As soon as I think/say this, I’ve ruined paradise.”
— David Shields, How Literature Saved My Life
Tagged: The Moment Passes, Paradise Lost, Lost When Found
“Suddenly everyone's tale is tellable, which seems to me a good thing, even if not everyone's story turns out to be fascinating or well told.”
— David Shields, Reality Hunger
Tagged: Personal Writing, Personal Essays, Storytelling
“Death is that moment when any possibility of learning the unknown is lost, when the inadequate sum of what is known becomes the totality of what there is to know.”
— David Shields, The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death
Tagged: Death, This Is Dying, The Gap Emerges
“In life, in love, otherness is sexy but unbridgeable.”
— David Shields, How Literature Saved My Life
Tagged: The Unbridgeable, Love, Sex, Longing
“The Corrections, say: I couldn't read that book if my life depended on it. It might be a 'good' novel or it might be a 'bad' novel, but something has happened to my imagination, which can no longer yield to the earnest embrace of novelistic form. ”
— David Shields, Reality Hunger
Tagged: Jonathan Franzen, Novels
“Is desire a sort of shadow around everything?”
— David Shields, Other People: Takes & Mistakes
Tagged: Desire, shadow
“Language is all we have to connect us, and it doesn’t, not quite.”
— David Shields, Other People: Takes & Mistakes
Tagged: Language, Connections, What Connects Us, Quote of the Moment, The Impossibility of Communication
“Sometimes what being a fan seems to be most about is self-defeat.”
— David Shields, Black Planet
Tagged: Fandom, Sports
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”
— David Shields, Other People: Takes & Mistakes
Tagged: Reality, Do We Really Want To See?, Don’t Let It All Through
“Is race on my brain, and am I screwed up? Or is it on everyone else’s brain, and am I just taking notes? No one ever acknowledges the true subject of our discussions; it can never get expressed directly, it simply can’t be, won’t be, isn’t allowed to be talked about openly, and so it comes out in a thousand indirect inflections.”
— David Shields, Black Planet
Tagged: Race, Repression
“You believe that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality (judiciously, as you will), we’ll act again, creating other realities, which you can study, too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you— all of you— will be left to just study what we do.”
— David Shields, Reality Hunger
Tagged: History, Too Fast, Reality Moves, Never Static, Against Objectivity
“The world is real; the suffering of others is real; one's actions can sometimes irrevocably determine the destiny of others; the mistakes one makes are often transmuted directly into others' pain; there is sometimes no way to undo that pain-the dead remain dead, the maimed are forever maimed, and there is no way to deny one's responsibility or culpability, for those mistakes are written, forever and as if in fire, in others' flesh.”
— David Shields, War Is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict
Tagged: Nightmare of History, Suffering
“In college, reading all those Greek tragedies and listening to the lectures about them, I would think, rather blithely, 'Well, that tragic flaw thing is nicely symmetrical: whatever makes Oedipus heroic is also—' What did I know then? Nothing. I didn’t feel in my bones as I do now that what powers our drive assures our downfall, that our birth date is our death sentence. You’re fated to kill your dad and marry your mom, so they send you away. You live with your new mom and dad, find out about the curse, run off and kill your real dad, marry your real mom. It was a setup. You had to test it. Even though you knew it would cost you your eyes, you had to do it. You had to push ahead. You had to prove who you are.”
— David Shields, How Literature Saved My Life
Tagged: Identity, Oedipus
“It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things, or the Nothingness, behind it. Grammar and Style— to me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it (be it something or nothing) begins to seep through: I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.”
— David Shields, Reality Hunger
Tagged: Writing
“I’m finding it harder to just ‘write.’ The seeking and sculpting of found text or sound have become my primary ‘artistic’ function. Actually generating that text or music seems increasingly difficult. Lately I’ll sit down with a blank pad and feel like I really have to dig down deep to get my own voice to come out over the ‘sample choir.’ It’s a very strange feeling, like a conductor trying to sing over the orchestra, and is, I believe, a fairly new one for artists.”
— David Shields, Reality Hunger
Tagged: Commonplace Book, Quotes, Writing
“When I come home, flush with all this new semi-insider gossip, my wife, Laurie, startles me by saying that during the first couple of months of my sabbatical, when I was home all the time, there had been 'no energy in the house' and how grateful she is that I’m finally doing something 'purposeful' in public. One can forget this or disguise it or pretend it isn’t so, but really the sexiest thing a husband can do is go out and return with news of the world.”
— David Shields, Black Planet
Tagged: Gossip, News
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