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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

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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
Thought
Lived
Like
Poet
Rented
Fiction
Psychosis
Wonder
Freud
Often
Reverse
House
Poets
True
Waking
Dream
Madness

More quotes by William H. Gass

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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
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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
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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
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I hate ideologies of all kinds, so I avoid jargon. I've done enough philosophy to know that some specialized terms are really needed. I don't complain when Kant does it. Or when Aristotle introduces all kinds of new words he needed them. But these other people [modern philosophers] are just obfuscating. It just makes me annoyed.
William H. Gass
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I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.
William H. Gass
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The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.
William H. Gass
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[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
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Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.
William H. Gass
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If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.
William H. Gass
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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
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I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
William H. Gass
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The true alchemists do not change lead into gold they change the world into words.
William H. Gass
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Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.
William H. Gass
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Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.
William H. Gass
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Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.
William H. Gass
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Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.
William H. Gass
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If you were a fully realized person-whatever the hell that would be-you wouldn't fool around writing books.
William H. Gass
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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
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The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.
William H. Gass
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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