Top 100 William H Gass Quotes
#1. His father had a dream: to keep his hands forever clean. Joey wasn't clear whether his father had ever understood that it takes a lot of digging in the dirt to do that.
William H Gass
#2. The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.
William H Gass
#4. Oh he was like them, like those laced-up ladies - warm from wards. A man, he still chewed the nipple, titillation, and risked no freer, deeper draught. Fearless in speech, he was cowardly in all else ... ah, to be rich, luxuriant, episcopal ... well, he'd conquered that by flight.
William H Gass
#5. I should like to suggest that at least on the face of it a stroke by stroke story of a copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken's wing.
William H Gass
#6. It's true there are moments - foolish moments, ecstasy on a tree stump - when I'm all but gone, scattered I like to think like seed, for I'm the sort now in the fool's position of having love left over which I'd like to lose; what good is it now to me, candy ungiven after Halloween?
William H Gass
#7. He wanted to sink down and hug the coals to his chest. Flamboyant...coins of light...oil, wood, tatters...fumes from acids, soap, smoke...the sunlight shattered.
William H Gass
#8. My face is muffled in my mother's clothing. Her rhinestones injure me. See: my feet are going. Fish flee the forefinger of my aunt. The sun streams over the geraniums. What has this to do with what I feel, with what I am.
William H Gass
#9. Happiness is just a priest who reads us words of consolation while we walk up the steps to the hangman.
William H Gass
#10. I don't know myself, what to do, where to go ... I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort ... it's what the world offers ... please leave me alone to dream as I fancy.
William H Gass
#11. For the speedy reader paragraphs become a country the eye flies over looking for landmarks, reference points, airports, restrooms, passages of sex.
William H Gass
#12. I have never seen the Lord God. But I have seen Absalom alive in the tree.
William H Gass
#13. Some may still be impatient to die for the emperor, but the chief point in life is to die of something and never for something if it can be helped.
William H Gass
#14. The expression "to write something down" suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.
William H Gass
#15. If death itself were to die, would it have a ghost, and would the ghost of death visit the dead in the guise of someone alive, if only to fright them from any temptation to return?
William H Gass
#16. Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.
William H Gass
#17. Sing, Susu, through your severed head, through your severed arteries; and I shall put my mouth to your lips as though you were such an instrument. My breath shall reinflate your brain. Susu, O bag of pipes, I approach you in my dreams.
William H Gass
#18. Still, he should be forgiven what we all want: forgetting within the fuck. Love is a nervous habit. Haven't many said so? Snacking. Smoking. Talking. Joking. Alike as light bulbs. Drinking. Drugging. Frigging. Fucking.
William H Gass
#19. As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.
William H Gass
#20. He could have set fire to it, the garden was dry enough, and burned it clean - privet, vines, and weeds; but he waited in his rooms through the winter instead, weeping and dreaming.
William H Gass
#21. Philosophy has a great sort of appeal in terms of an artistic or aesthetic organization of concepts. It's a conceptual art.
William H Gass
#22. One thing - one thing exceeds the eternity of the star, he cries, and that is the dark which surrounds it.
William H Gass
#23. Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house
William H Gass
#24. For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.
William H Gass
#26. Her world must be flat because she disappeared all at once rather than a bit at a time.
William H Gass
#27. I publish a piece in order to kill it, so that I won't have to fool around with it any longer.
William H Gass
#28. And how would he learn his history now? Imagine growing up in a world where only generals and geniuses, empires and companies, had histories, not your own town or grandfather, house or Samantha - none of the things you'd loved.
William H Gass
#30. Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.
William H Gass
#31. Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.
William H Gass
#32. Of course, in philosophy, you settle one bill only by neglecting another, a strategy which must eventually fail since all of them fall due at the same time.
William H Gass
#33. I usually have poor to absent relations with editors because they have a habit of desiring changes and I resist changes.
William H Gass
#34. If you want to think about something really funny, kiddo, consider the fact that our favorite modern bad guys became villains by serving as heroes first
to millions. It is now a necessary apprenticeship.
William H Gass
#36. For suppose, and mind it narrowly, that life is simply a shadow bodies cast inside themselves when struck by all those queerly various bits and particles, those pieces, those streams of - what? - of science. Death in such a case would be only another arrangement.
William H Gass
#37. Why were they whining then? ... whining, damn them, whining ...
Because they'd have to give up their hope of living like an animal and return to an honest, conscious, human life. The prospect was hard.
William H Gass
#38. Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.
William H Gass
#39. The world of conceptualized ideas is quite wonderful, even when it's - like Aristotle's Physics - an outmoded book. The physics is not true. But the reasoning is dazzling.
William H Gass
#41. But they say that sexuality can be dangerously Dionysian. Nowhere do we need order more than at any orgy.
William H Gass
#42. Some screw for science only in the afternoon, while others keep their faith with evening - here Orcutt chuckled - it's a matter of light, I understand, but which makes which I can't remember.
William H Gass
#43. The speeding reader guts a book the way the skillful clean fish. The gills are gone, the tail, the scales, the fins; then the fillet slides away swifly as though fed to a seal.
William H Gass
#44. I suspect that the first dictator of this country will be called coach.
William H Gass
#45. Reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers ... annotations, arrows ... an oudine of its design ... very seriously mislead.
William H Gass
#46. As a teacher, it's a great help to be teaching philosophical systems you don't believe. You can actually do a better job of presenting them if you leave your beliefs at the door.
William H Gass
#47. Furthermore, the initial page, always crucial, passed every test, with its promises and divisions, its portentous opening paragraph like the great door of a church, its exotic setting and strange names, the rolling orchestration of its prose.
William H Gass
#48. The responsibility of any science, any pure pursuit, is ultimately to itself, and on this point physics, philosophy, and poetry unite with Satan in their determination not to serve. Any end is higher than utility, when ends are up.
William H Gass
#50. Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.
William H Gass
#51. The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.
William H Gass
#52. Writing. Not writing. Twin Terrors. Putting one's mother into words ... It may have been easier to put her in her grave.
William H Gass
#53. It's not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word
William H Gass
#54. Every day he thought would last forever, and the night forever, and the dawn drag eternally another long and empty day to light forever; yet they sped away, the day, the night ...
William H Gass
#55. It's a simple world for her. A curtain fluttering - that's how she is - lives, moves - obediently, yet with every appearnace of freedom and caprice.
William H Gass
#56. They are merely partaking of the evolutionary miracle found most obviously in man, but not necessarily any more useful to his survival than a raven's, or a cat's, or a chimp's is to its.
William H Gass
#57. Of course there is enough to stir our wonder anywhere; there's enough to love, anywhere, if one is strong enough, if one is diligent enough, if one is perceptive, patient, kind enough
whatever it takes.
William H Gass
#58. We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us.
- William H. Gass, "Mr. Gaddis and His Goddamn Books" (2006)
William H Gass
#59. Surely it's better to live in the country, to live on a prairie by a drawing of rivers, in Iowa or Illinois or Indiana, say, than in any city, in any stinking fog of human beings, in any blooming orchard of machines. It ought to be.
William H Gass
#60. Some people say their life is full of darkness and I wonder why they don't just try and switch the lights on.
William H Gass
#61. I'd like to look below my eyes and see not language staring back at me, not sentences or single words or awkward pen lines, but a surface clear and burnished as glass.
William H Gass
#62. Lost in the corn rows, I remember feeling just another stalk, and thus this country takes me over in the way I occupy myself when I am well ... completely - to the edge of both my house and body. No one notices, when they walk by, that I am brimming in the doorways.
William H Gass
#63. Seldom was blue for blue's sake present till Pollock hurled pigment at his canvas like pies.
William H Gass
#64. Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.
William H Gass
#66. It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to play - the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn't life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life - its facility, its use.
William H Gass
#67. As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks, I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour
William H Gass
#68. I cannot walk under the wires. The sparrows scatter like handfuls of gravel. Really, wires are voices in thin strips. They are words wound in cables. Bars of connection.
William H Gass
#69. I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.
William H Gass
#70. Time cannot do to ordinary things what we timelessly do to one another.
William H Gass
#73. Works of art are meant to be lived with and loved, and if we try to understand them, we should try to understand them as we try to understand anyone - in order to know them better, not in order to know something else.
William H Gass
#74. The alcoholic trance is not just a haze, as though the eyes were also unshaven. It is not a mere buzzing in the ears, a dizzinessor disturbance of balance. One arrives in the garden again, at nursery time, when the gentle animals are fed and in all the world there are only toys.
William H Gass
#75. We were late among the living, and by the time God got to us ice was already slipping from the poles as if from an imperfectly decorated cake.
William H Gass
#76. No one could say, looking at her lined, pale and puffy face, the shapeless garish sack she had double-pinned around her, or the misfocusing eyes and slack wet mouth, that she had led the right life, and she knew it, not even with Freud's fist could she repress that ...
William H Gass
#77. If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.
William H Gass
#78. It art can only succeed through the cooperating imagination and intelligence of its consumers, who fill out, for themselves, the artist's world and make it round, and whose own special genius partly determine the ultimate glory of it.
William H Gass
#79. Only the slow reader will notice the odd crowd of images-flier, butcher, seal-which have gathered to comment on the aims and activities of the speeding reader, perhaps like gossips at a wedding.
William H Gass
#80. Honey, you are a baby in this world and don't know how to howl yet.
William H Gass
#81. When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid.
William H Gass
#82. They try to thrive. To multiply. To make murder a method of management.
William H Gass
#83. He hated not being heard, having to shout at the insides of himself, having to live in his dreams the way he lived in one of his rented rooms, being opposed, denied, neglected, refused. Kicked out.
William H Gass
#84. What one wants to do with stories is screw them up.
William H Gass
#86. 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.
William H Gass
#87. I was struck by the way in which meanings are historically attached to words: it is so accidental, so remote, so twisted. A word is like a schoolgirl's room
a complete mess
so the great thing is to make out a way of seeing it all as ordered, as right, as inferred and following.
William H Gass
#88. The things that stayed were things that didn't matter except they stayed, night and day, all seasons the same, and were peaceful to a fault and boded no ill but thought well enough of themselves to repeat their presences.
William H Gass
#89. I cannot estimate how much this pleases me. I feel I have succeeded to the idleness of God.
William H Gass
#90. I do think of my reader, or listener, really, more often, if I give a lecture, for example, and I know that I'm talking to these people; I enjoy sort of preening them a bit. But it's a matter of decorum, basically.
William H Gass
#91. We converse as we live by repeating, by combining and recombining a few elements over and over again just as nature does when of elementary particles it builds a world.
William H Gass
#92. If you were a fully realized person-whatever the hell that would be-you wouldn't fool around writing books.
William H Gass
#93. Wills aren't really strong or weak; it is the characters that they express and serve that are.
William H Gass
#94. We have a name for the Second Coming but none for a second coming.
William H Gass
#95. It is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.
William H Gass
#96. In the spring I'd shit with the door open, watching the blackbirds
William H Gass
#97. More and more I knew my budding world was ruined if he were free in it. As a specimen Mr. Wallace might be my pride. Glory to him in a jar. But free! Better to release the sweet moving tiger or the delicate snake, the monumental elephant. I was just a castaway to be devoured.
William H Gass
#99. Still, the days were endurable and came and went like breath with only a few deep heaves to harm the pace.
William H Gass
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