Walter Abish Quotes

Walter Abish delivers quirky, unsettling snippets that poke fun at American anxieties.

7 quotes

1. America fears the unshaven legs, the unshaven men's cheeks, the aroma of perspiration, and the limp prick. Above all it fears the limp prick.

2. 'All About Abish', John Updike, The New Yorker, February 2004.

3. In the past the French came to Germany less with the desire to understand it than with a zealous desire to interpret, to analyze it dispassionately something for which their training at the Ecole Normale Superieure or the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the French language superbly equipped them to do.

4. Once in a while there are things the brain simply refuses to accept as being true because they appear too improbable, too unlikely, too preposterous.

5. Is it possible for anyone in Germany, nowadays, to raise his right hand, for whatever the reason, and not be flooded by the memory of a dream to end all dreams?

6. “I lie and am lied to, but the result of my lie is mental leaps, memory, knowledge.”

7. “Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement... anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation.”