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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

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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
Leave
Drenched
Past
Thunderstorm
Like
Discouraging
Yesterday
Toward
Behinds
Behind
Coming

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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.
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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.
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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.
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And I am in retirement from love.
William H. Gass
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When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid.
William H. Gass
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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.
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I usually have poor to absent relations with editors because they have a habit of desiring changes and I resist changes.
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The death of God represents not only the realization that gods have never existed, but the contention that such a belief is no longer even irrationally possible: that neither reason nor the taste and temper of the times condones it. The belief lingers on, of course, but it does so like astrology or a faith in a flat earth.
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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
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Getting even is one reason for writing.
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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.
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The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.
William H. Gass
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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.
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What one wants to do with stories is screw them up.
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
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Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.
William H. Gass
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I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.
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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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.
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Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal
William H. Gass