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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

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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
Though
Feds
Fins
Away
Guts
Speeding
Book
Scales
Seal
Way
Fish
Seals
Fishes
Skillful
Clean
Slides
Reader
Tail
Fillet
Gone
Tails
Gills

More quotes by William H. Gass

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For the speedy reader paragraphs become a country the eye flies over looking for landmarks, reference points, airports, restrooms, passages of sex.
William H. Gass
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I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
William H. Gass
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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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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 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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[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 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 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
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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
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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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Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal
William H. Gass
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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.
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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Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.
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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Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.
William H. Gass
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I get very tense working, so I often have to get up and wander around the house. It is very bad on my stomach. I have to be mad to be working well anyway, and then I am mad about the way things are going on the page in addition. My ulcer flourishes and I have to chew lots of pills. When my work is going well, I am usually sort of sick.
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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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