David Shields

Contradiction

399
This sentence is a lie.

400

Something can be true and untrue at the same time.

401

The whole content of my being shrieks in contradiction against myself.

402

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” I’ve always disliked the unnecessary comma in the middle of this famous Fitzgerald dictum, suggestive as it is of an inability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time while still retaining etc.

403

We are, I know not how, double within ourselves, with the result that we do not believe what we believe, and we cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.

404

Negative capability: capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

405

It’s natural to enter into dialogues and disputes with others, because it’s natural to enter into disputes with oneself: the mind works by contradiction.

406

Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.

407

One of the tricks in writing a personal essay is that you have to develop a dialogue between the parts of yourself that in a way corresponds to the conflict in fiction. You cop to various tendencies, and then you struggle with these tendencies.

408

I prefer the epistolary monologue to the drama of fiction.

409

Ambitious work doesn’t resolve contradictions in a spurious harmony but, instead, embodies the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.