Quotes by William H. Gass

William H. Gass

[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.

Firsts

Real

Self

And I am in retirement from love.

Retirement

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.

Jobs

Teacher

Teaching

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

Block

Feet

Smell

Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.

Blue

Color

Interiors

But the body fails us and the mirror knows, and we no longer insist that the gray hush be carried off its surface by the cloth, for we have run to fat, and wrinkles encircle the eyes and notch the neck where the skin wattles, and the flesh of the arms hangs loose like an overlarge sleeve, veins thicken like ropes and empurple the body as though they had been drawn there by a pen, freckles darken, liver spots appear, the hairah, the hair is exhausted and gray and lusterless, in weary rolls like cornered lint.

Eye

Mirrors

Running

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

Becoming

Fiction

Visuals

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.

Character

Stories

Writing

For the speedy reader paragraphs become a country the eye flies over looking for landmarks, reference points, airports, restrooms, passages of sex.

Country

Eye

Sex

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

Dream

House

Psychosis

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Alive

Ambition

Animal

Art

Astrology

Aunt

Beautiful

Becoming

Block

Blue

Body

Book

Brows

Character

Children

Color

Connections

Country

Crafts

Crowds

Cutting

Darkness

Desire

Doe

Dream

Drinking

Earth

Editors

Elements

Empathy

Eruption

Expression

Eye

Faces

Fall

Feet

Feminine

Fiction

Firsts

Fog

Found

Giving Up

Gone

Gossip

Green

Habit

Hands

Hate

House

I Hate

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Quotes by William H. Gass

William H. Gass

[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.

And I am in retirement from love.

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.

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

Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

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.

For the speedy reader paragraphs become a country the eye flies over looking for landmarks, reference points, airports, restrooms, passages of sex.

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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