Top 80 Lydia Davis Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Two Types Excitable A woman was depressed and distraught for days after losing her pen. Then she became so excited about an ad for a shoe sale that she drove three hours to a shoe store in Chicago. Phlegmatic A man spotted a fire in a dormitory one evening, and walked away to look for an extinguisher in another building. He found the extinguisher, and walked back to the fire with it.”

— Lydia Davis

52. “If I give all I have and you give all you have, isn’t that a kind of equality? No, he says.”

— Lydia Davis

53. “At a certain point in her life, she realises 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

54. “The people in your happy memories have to be the same people who want to have you in their own happy memories.”

— Lydia Davis

55. “Often, the idea that there can be a wide range of translations of one text doesn’t occur to people – or that a translation could be bad, very bad, and unfaithful to the original.”

— Lydia Davis

56. “In some sense the text and the translator are locked in struggle – ‘I attacked that sentence, it resisted me, I attacked another, it eluded me’ – a struggle in which, curiously, when the translator wins, the text wins too...”

— Lydia Davis

57. “In those days, I wanted to cry, I wanted to shout, I wanted to wring my hands and complain, and I did try to complain to some people, though I could never cry or complain as much as I wanted to. Some people listened and tried to be helpful, but they could never listen long enough; the conversation always had to come to an end.”

— Lydia Davis

58. “That night I couldn’t sleep at all. Mozart had shown me immortal light, and I now felt as though I were under direct orders from Mozart. He expressed his sadness not only with the minor scale but with the major scale as well.”

— Lydia Davis

59. “I think a lot of what goes into writing can be taught – not mixing metaphors, etc.”

— Lydia Davis

60. “I started with small-press publishers, who were willing to publish all sorts of forms. I didn’t move to the larger presses until they knew what they were getting in for.”

— Lydia Davis

61. “Maybe I had been alone in that apartment so much by then that I had retreated into some kind of inner, unsociable space that was hard to come out of. Maybe I felt I had disappeared and I was comfortable that way and did not want to be forced back into existence. I don’t know.”

— Lydia Davis

62. “Do what you want to do, and don’t worry if it’s a little odd or doesn’t fit the market.”

— Lydia Davis

63. “I can talk for a long time only when it’s about something boring.”

— Lydia Davis

64. “And, everyone knows, to tolerate a person telling you about his childhood it is necessary to be in love with him.”

— Lydia Davis

65. “I’m used to rereading e-mails, even, before sending them – a bit compulsive. So this is high speed roller coaster for me!”

— Lydia Davis

66. “But it is curious how you can see that an idea is absolutely true and correct and yet not believe it deeply enough to act on it.”

— Lydia Davis

67. “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

68. “Part of my mind is working on how to end the thing while I’m going on. You need at least two brains to write.”

— Lydia Davis

69. “As the writer, I may choose to ignore the emotional heart of the matter, and focus on details, and trust that the heart of the matter will be conveyed nevertheless.”

— Lydia Davis

70. “I don’t feel I have to struggle against allegory. I let the readers do the interpreting.”

— Lydia Davis

71. “This dull, difficult novel I have brought with me on my trip – I keep trying to read it. I have gone back to it so many times, each time dreading it and each time finding it no better than the last time, that by now it has become something of an old friend. My old friend the bad novel.”

— Lydia Davis

72. “I have never associated myself with such an unexpected part of the body as the thyroid.”

— Lydia Davis

73. “I looked at whale jawbones in the museum this morning. Then I did some shopping. Whenever I go into the drugstore it seems that many people are buying condoms and motion sickness medicine.”

— Lydia Davis

74. “And then, there have always been days when my mind does not make connections very fast. There are always days when my mind is cloudy, or I forget things, or I feel as if I am in a different town or a different house – that something around me or about me is not normal.”

— Lydia Davis

75. “I think the close work I do as a translator pays off in my writing – I’m always searching for multiple ways to say things.”

— Lydia Davis

76. “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

77. “As long as everything stayed the same, it seemed possible for him to come back. As long as everything was the way he had left it, his place was open for him. But if things changed beyond a certain point, his place in my life began to close, he could not reenter it, or if he did, he would have to enter in a new way.”

— Lydia Davis

78. “When I’m trying a new form- trying to do something I’m not used to doing, which was true of the novel.”

— Lydia Davis

79. “But no matter how clearly I saw what I was doing, I would go on doing it, as though I simply allowed my shame to sit there alongside my need to do it, one separate from the other. I often chose to do the wrong thing and feel bad about it rather than to do the right thing, if the wrong thing was what I wanted.”

— Lydia Davis

80. “Looking back at that evening was almost better than experiencing it the first time, because it did not go faster than I could manage it, I did not have to worry about my part, and I was not distracted by doubt, because I knew how it would come out. I relived it so often, it might have happened just so that I could relive it later.”

— Lydia Davis

81. “That fall, after the summer when they both died, she and my father, there was a point when I wanted to say to them, All right, you have died, I know that, and you’ve been dead for a while, we have all absorbed this and we’ve explored the feelings we had at first, in reaction to it, surprising feelings, some of them, and the feelings we’re having now that a few months have gone by – but now it’s time for you to come back. You have been away long enough.”

— Lydia Davis

82. “I was tired of so much thinking, which was what I did most in those days. I did other things, but I went on thinking while I did them. I might feel something, but I would think about what I was feeling at the same time. I even had to think about what I was thinking and wonder why I was thinking it.”

— Lydia Davis

83. “I copied the address into my address book, erasing an earlier one that had not been good for very long. No address of his was good for very long and the paper in my address book where his address is written is thin and soft from being erased so often.”

— Lydia Davis

84. “Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never been here before.”

— Lydia Davis

85. “Today I am feeling that chronological order is not a good thing, even if it is easier, and that I should break it up. Is it that when these events are in chronological order they are not propelled forward by cause and effect, by need and satisfaction, they do not spring ahead with their own energy but are simply dragged forward by the passage of time?”

— Lydia Davis

86. “I want to remember exactly what she said, but someone reading this does not mind if it is not exact: Please, says that someone, just choose one or the other and get on with the story. Give me fiction, if you have to – the approximation. Not the truth, along with your doubt.”

— Lydia Davis