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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
Fish
Forefinger
Feel
Fishes
Muffled
Feels
Sun
Injure
Going
Childhood
Flee
Feet
Aunt
Face
Clothings

More quotes by William H. Gass

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Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.
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It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word
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I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
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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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Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.
William H. Gass
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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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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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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.
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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The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.
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
William H. Gass
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I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.
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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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
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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.
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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The world of conceptualized ideas is quite wonderful, even when it's - like Aristotle's Physics - an outmoded book. The physics is not true. But the reasoning is dazzling.
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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Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal
William H. Gass