Quote

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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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
Eye
Ears
Nursery
Also
Animals
Alcoholics
Time
Garden
Feds
Buzzing
World
Mere
Toys
Haze
Balance
Innocence
Trance
Animal
Alcohol
Alcoholic
Eyes
Gentle
Disturbance
Though
Drinking
Arrives

More quotes by William H. Gass

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And I am in retirement from love.
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What else is soul but a listener?
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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.
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I should like to suggest that at least on the face of it a stroke by stroke story of a copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken's wing.
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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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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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Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal
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I hate ideologies of all kinds, so I avoid jargon. I've done enough philosophy to know that some specialized terms are really needed. I don't complain when Kant does it. Or when Aristotle introduces all kinds of new words he needed them. But these other people [modern philosophers] are just obfuscating. It just makes me annoyed.
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I cannot walk under the wires. The sparrows scatter like handfuls of gravel. Really, wires are voices in thin strips. They are words wound in cables. Bars of connection.
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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 there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.
William H. Gass
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Getting even is one reason for writing.
William H. Gass
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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 body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.
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Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.
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