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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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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
Actually
Philosophical
Jobs
Door
Helping
Doors
Better
Teaching
Great
Leave
Believe
Teacher
Presenting
Belief
Systems
Help
Beliefs

More quotes by 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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Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.
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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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Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.
William H. Gass
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What else is soul but a listener?
William H. Gass
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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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What one wants to do with stories is screw them up.
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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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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Some people say their life is full of darkness and I wonder why they don't just try and switch the lights on.
William H. Gass
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I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
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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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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Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal
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.
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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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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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.
William H. Gass
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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