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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.

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
Mother
Streams
Geraniums
Feel
Fish
Forefinger
Feels
Fishes
Muffled
Going
Sun
Injure
Childhood
Flee
Feet
Aunt
Face
Clothings
Faces
Clothing

More quotes by William H. Gass

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As a teacher, it's a great help to be teaching philosophical systems you don't believe. You can actually do a better job of presenting them if you leave your beliefs at the door.
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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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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.
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It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word
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.
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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 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
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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?
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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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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
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Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.
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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Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal
William H. Gass
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What else is soul but a listener?
William H. Gass
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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.
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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And I am in retirement from love.
William H. Gass
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Of course there is enough to stir our wonder anywhere there's enough to love, anywhere, if one is strong enough, if one is diligent enough, if one is perceptive, patient, kind enough -- whatever it takes.
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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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