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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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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
Brow
Brows
Meet
Reader
Stupid
Book
Always
Furrowed
More quotes by William H. Gass
Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.
William H. Gass
The true alchemists do not change lead into gold they change the world into words.
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
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
Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal
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
And I am in retirement from love.
William H. Gass
The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.
William H. Gass
Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.
William H. Gass
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
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
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 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
When reviewers take the trouble to compliment a writer on her style, it is usually because she has made it easy for them to slide from one sentence to another like an otter down a slope.
William H. Gass
Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.
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
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
The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.
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
