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

More quotes by William H. Gass

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Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.
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And I am in retirement from love.
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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.
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Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.
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I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
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Philosophy has a great sort of appeal in terms of an artistic or aesthetic organization of concepts. It's a conceptual art.
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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.
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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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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.
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Getting even is one reason for writing.
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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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[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.
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The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.
William H. Gass
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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
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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
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If you were a fully realized person-whatever the hell that would be-you wouldn't fool around writing books.
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Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.
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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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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.
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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