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

More quotes by 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.
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I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.
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The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.
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Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.
William H. Gass
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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.
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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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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The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.
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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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The true alchemists do not change lead into gold they change the world into words.
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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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What one wants to do with stories is screw them up.
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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When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid.
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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Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.
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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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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Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.
William H. Gass
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Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal
William H. Gass