Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
William H. Gass
Age: 93 †
Born: 1924
Born: July 30
Died: 2017
Died: December 6
Critic
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Military Officer
Novelist
Prosaist
University Teacher
Writer
Fargo
North Dakota
William Howard Gass
Touch
Observed
Taste
Progressive
Feet
Block
Hear
Contact
Maybe
Miles
Rilke
Love
Senses
Shortening
Requires
Devour
Smell
Blocks
More quotes by William H. Gass
What else is soul but a listener?
William H. Gass
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
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
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
What one wants to do with stories is screw them up.
William H. Gass
If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.
William H. Gass
Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.
William H. Gass
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
Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal
William H. Gass
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
And I am in retirement from love.
William H. Gass
Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.
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
I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.
William H. Gass
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
Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.
William H. Gass
I am firmly of the opinion that people who can’t speak have nothing to say. It’s one more thing we do to the poor, the deprived: cut out their tongues … allow them a language as lousy as their life
William H. Gass
When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid.
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
I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
William H. Gass
