William H. Gass Quotes - Page 2

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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

  Temptation, Alive, Return

  William H. Gass (2010). “A Temple of Texts”, p.346, Knopf Group E-Books

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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

  Block, Smell, Feet

  William H. Gass (2014). “On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry”, p.18, New York Review of Books

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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

  Cutting, People, Tongue

  William H. Gass (2014). “On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry”, p.25, New York Review of Books

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• So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there’s one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is love that brings it own birth with it, just as Plato has declared, and that you should therefore give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them

  William H. Gass

  Plato, Giving Up, Writing

  William H. Gass (2014). “On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry”, p.89, New York Review of Books

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• Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.

  William H. Gass

  Literature, Crafts, Pennies

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• And I am in retirement from love.

  William H. Gass

  Retirement

  William H. Gass (2014). “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country: And Other Stories”, p.128, New York Review of Books

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• When reviewers take the trouble to compliment a writer on her style, it is usually because she has made it easy for them to slide from one sentence to another like an otter down a slope.

  William H. Gass

  Otters, Style, Slides

  Source: theuntranslated.wordpress.com

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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

  Doe, Elements, World

  William H. Gass (1978). “The world within the word: essays”, Alfred A. Knopf

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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

  Way, Rooms, Twisted

  William H. Gass, Theodore G. Ammon (2003). “Conversations with William H. Gass”, p.23, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.

  William H. Gass

  Beautiful, Fall, Found

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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

  Art, Philosophy, Organization

  Interview with Stephen Schenkenberg, www.believermag.com. November, 2005.

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• The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.

  William H. Gass

  Body, Saviour

  "Why you should read: William H Gass" by Seth Colter Walls, www.theguardian.com. November 3, 2015.

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• What one wants to do with stories is screw them up.

  William H. Gass

  Stories, Crafts, Want

  William H. Gass (1997). “Finding a Form: Essays”, p.46, Cornell University Press

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• When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid.

  William H. Gass

  Stupid, Book, Brows

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• Knowing has two poles, and they are always poles apart: carnal knowing, the laying on of hands, the hanging of the fact by head or heels, the measurement of mass and motion, the calibration of brutal blows, the counting of supplies; and spiritual knowing, invisibly felt by the inside self, who is but a fought-over field of distraction, a stage where we recite the monotonous monologue that is our life, a knowing governed by internal tides, by intimations, motives, resolutions, by temptations, secrecy, shame, and pride.

  William H. Gass

  Spiritual, Knowledge, Pride

  William H. Gass (1997). “Finding a Form: Essays”, p.179, Cornell University Press

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• Getting even is one reason for writing.

  William H. Gass

  Writing, Reason

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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

  Country, Sex, Eye

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• The word itself has another color. It’s not a word with any resonance, although the e was once pronounced. There is only the bump now between b and l, the relief at the end, the whew. It hasn’t the sly turn which crimson takes halfway through, yellow’s deceptive jelly, or the rolled-down sound in brown. It hasn’t violet’s rapid sexual shudder or like a rough road the irregularity of ultramarine, the low puddle in mauve like a pancake covered in cream, the disapproving purse to pink, the assertive brevity of red, the whine of green.

  William H. Gass

  Yellow, Color, Green

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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

  Dream, Lying, Book

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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

  Writing, Expression, Movement

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• One may decide that the nipple most nearly resembles a newly ripened raspberry (never, be it noted, the plonk of water on a pond at the commencement of a drizzle, a simple bladder nozzle built on the suction principal gum bubble, mole, or birth ward, bumpy metal button, or the painful red eruption of a swelling), but does one care to see his breakfast fruit as a sweetened milky bowl of snipped nips? no.

  William H. Gass

  Simple, Water, Eruption

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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

  Hate, Philosophy, People

  Interview with Stephen Schenkenberg, www.believermag.com. November, 2005.

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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

  Mother, Aunt, Feet

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• If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.

  William H. Gass

  Would Be, Fiction, Feminine

  William H. Gass (2012). “World Within The Word”, p.74, Knopf

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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

  Mad, Sick, House

  William H. Gass, Theodore G. Ammon (2003). “Conversations with William H. Gass”, p.34, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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