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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.

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
Face
Chickens
Copulation
Story
Consumption
Chew
Faces
Account
Stroke
Stories
Absurd
Pornography
Like
Accounts
Strokes
Wings
Chicken
Exactly
Suggest
Least
Wing

More quotes by 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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The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.
William H. Gass
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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
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 there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.
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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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The things that stayed were things that didn't matter except they stayed, night and day, all seasons the same, and were peaceful to a fault and boded no ill but thought well enough of themselves to repeat their presences.
William H. Gass
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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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Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.
William H. Gass
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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.
William H. Gass
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What else is soul but a listener?
William H. Gass
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The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.
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.
William H. Gass