William H. Gass Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.”
-- William H. Gass -
“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 -
“The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.”
-- William H. Gass -
“Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal”
-- William H. Gass -
“It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word”
-- William H. Gass -
“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 -
“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 -
“But the body fails us and the mirror knows, and we no longer insist that the gray hush be carried off its surface by the cloth, for we have run to fat, and wrinkles encircle the eyes and notch the neck where the skin wattles, and the flesh of the arms hangs loose like an overlarge sleeve, veins thicken like ropes and empurple the body as though they had been drawn there by a pen, freckles darken, liver spots appear, the hairah, the hair is exhausted and gray and lusterless, in weary rolls like cornered lint.”
-- William H. Gass -
“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 -
“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 -
“One may decide that the nipple most nearly resembles a newly ripened raspberry (never, be it noted, the plonk of water on a pond at the commencement of a drizzle, a simple bladder nozzle built on the suction principal gum bubble, mole, or birth ward, bumpy metal button, or the painful red eruption of a swelling), but does one care to see his breakfast fruit as a sweetened milky bowl of snipped nips? no.”
-- William H. Gass -
“So if hunger provokes wailing and wailing brings the breast; if the breast permits sucking and milk suggests its swallow; if swallowing issues in sleep and stomachy comfort, then need, ache, message, object, act, and satisfaction are soon associated like charms on a chain; shortly our wants begin to envision the things which well reduce them, and the organism is finally said to wish.”
-- William H. Gass -
“How do we know, then, when a code's been cracked?when we are right?when do we know if we have even received a message? Why, naturally, when, upon one set of substitutions, sense emerges like the outline under a rubbing; when a single tentative construal leads to several; when all the sullen letters of the code cry TEAM! after YEA! has been, by several hands, uncovered.”
-- William H. Gass -
“We have scarcely gotten home ... when our children's sneezes greet us, skinned knees bleed after waiting all day to do so. There is the bellyache and the burned-out basement bulb, the stalled car and the incontinent cat. The windows frost, the toilets sweat, the body of our spouse is one cold shoulder and the darkness of our bedroom is soon full of the fallen shadows of our failures.”
-- William H. Gass -
“The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.”
-- William H. Gass -
“Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.”
-- William H. Gass -
“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 -
“[As] authorities "over" us are removed, as we wobble out on our own, the question of whether to be or not to be arises with real relevance for the first time, since the burden of being is felt most fully by the self-determining self.”
-- William H. Gass -
“In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.”
-- William H. Gass -
“Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.”
-- William H. Gass -
“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 -
“If you were a fully realized person-whatever the hell that would be-you wouldn't fool around writing books.”
-- William H. Gass -
“Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.”
-- William H. Gass -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid.”
-- William H. Gass -
“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
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