William H Gass Quotes & Sayings

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

Public libraries have succumbed to the same pressures that have overwhelmed the basic cultural functions of museums and universities, aims that should remain what they were, not because the old ways are always better but because in this case they were the right ones: the sustaining of standards, the preservation of quality, the conservation of literacy's history, the education of the heart, eye and mind. Now libraries devote far too much of their restricted space, and their limited budget, to public amusement. It is a fact of philistine life that amusement is where the money is. — William H Gass

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

Still, he should be forgiven what we all want: forgetting within the fuck. Love is a nervous habit. Haven't many said so? Snacking. Smoking. Talking. Joking. Alike as light bulbs. Drinking. Drugging. Frigging. Fucking. — William H Gass

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

Some may still be impatient to die for the emperor, but the chief point in life is to die of something and never for something if it can be helped. — William H Gass

For suppose, and mind it narrowly, that life is simply a shadow bodies cast inside themselves when struck by all those queerly various bits and particles, those pieces, those streams of - what? - of science. Death in such a case would be only another arrangement. — William H Gass

I do have a very conscious desire not to be academic. I'm antiacademic. I hate jargon. I hate that sort of pretension. I am a person who [commits] breaches of decorum - not in private life, but in my work. They are part of my mode of operation. That kind of playfulness is part of my nature in general. The paradox that, in a way, to take something very seriously, you can't always be serious about it. — William H Gass

He hated not being heard, having to shout at the insides of himself, having to live in his dreams the way he lived in one of his rented rooms, being opposed, denied, neglected, refused. Kicked out. — William H Gass

I have never seen the Lord God. But I have seen Absalom alive in the tree. — William H Gass

I know of nothing more difficult than knowing who you are, and having the courage to share the reasons for the catastrophe of your character with the world. — William H Gass

I suspect if we were as familiar with our bones as with our skin, we'd never bury dead but shrine them in their rooms, arranged as we might like to find them on a visit; and our enemies, if we could steal their bodies from the battle sites, would be museumed as they died, the steel still eloquent in their sides, their metal hats askew, the protective toes of their shoes unworn, and friend and enemy would be so wondrously historical that in a hundred years we'd find the jaws still hung for the same speech and all the parts we spent our life with titled as they always were - rib cage, collar, skull - still repetitious, still defiant, angel light, still worthy of memorial and affection. After all, what does it mean to say that when our cat has bitten through the shell and put confusion in the pulp, the life goes out of them? Alas for us, I want to cry, our bones are secret, showing last, so we must love what perishes: the muscles and the waters and the fats. — William H Gass

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

Why were they whining then? ... whining, damn them, whining ...
Because they'd have to give up their hope of living like an animal and return to an honest, conscious, human life. The prospect was hard. — William H Gass

But they say that sexuality can be dangerously Dionysian. Nowhere do we need order more than at any orgy. — William H Gass

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

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

The death of God represents not only the realization that gods have never existed, but the contention that such a belief is no longer even irrationally possible: that neither reason nor the taste and temper of the times condones it. The belief lingers on, of course, but it does so like astrology or a faith in a flat earth. — William H Gass

It's true there are moments - foolish moments, ecstasy on a tree stump - when I'm all but gone, scattered I like to think like seed, for I'm the sort now in the fool's position of having love left over which I'd like to lose; what good is it now to me, candy ungiven after Halloween? — William H Gass

Writing. Not writing. Twin Terrors. Putting one's mother into words ... It may have been easier to put her in her grave. — William H Gass

Yet nature turns a dumb face toward us like a cow. When we read its wonders, we wonder whether we haven't written them ourselves. We are in ferment, but our greatness grows like a bubble of froth. We sense that existence itself lacks substance; that it is serious in the wrong sense; that its heaviness is that of wet air. The sublime ... ah, the sublime is far off, though we call for its coming. Yes. Life falls short
it is never what it should be. Rhymes will not rescue it. Days end, and begin again, automatically. Only the clock connects them. Sullen sunshine is followed by pitiless frost, and the consequence is we are a tick or two nearer oblivion, and the alarm for our unwaking. — William H Gass

He could have set fire to it, the garden was dry enough, and burned it clean - privet, vines, and weeds; but he waited in his rooms through the winter instead, weeping and dreaming. — William H Gass

One thing - one thing exceeds the eternity of the star, he cries, and that is the dark which surrounds it. — William H Gass

Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated. — William H Gass

Oh he was like them, like those laced-up ladies - warm from wards. A man, he still chewed the nipple, titillation, and risked no freer, deeper draught. Fearless in speech, he was cowardly in all else ... ah, to be rich, luxuriant, episcopal ... well, he'd conquered that by flight. — William H Gass

There are few poets today who can equal, in their esthetic exploitation of language, in their depth of commitment to their medium, in their range of conceptual understanding, in the purity of their closed forms, the work of Nabokov, Borges, Beckett, Barth, Broch, Gaddis, or Calvino, or any of half-a-dozen extraordinarily gifted South Americans. — William H Gass

If we had the true and complete history of one man - which would be the history of his head - we would sign the warrants and end ourselves forever, not because of the wickedness we would find within that man, no, but because of the meagerness of feeling, the miniaturization of meaning, the pettiness of ambition, the vulgarities, the vanities, the diminution of intelligence, the endless trivia we'd encounter, the ever present dust. — William H Gass

Furthermore, the sense of passion or of power, of depth and vibrancy, feeling and vision, we take away from any work is the result of the intermingling, balance, play, and antagonism between these: it is the arrangement of blues, not any blue itself, which lets us see the mood it formulates, whether pensive melancholy or thoughtless delight, so that one to whom aesthetic experience comes easily will see, as Schopenhauer suggested, sadness in things as readily as smoky violet or moist verdigris. — William H Gass

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

The expression "to write something down" suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it. — William H Gass

Birthdays, like weddings, anniversaries, baptisms, bar mitzvahs, wakes, are occasions to retie family ties, renew family feuds, restore family feeling, add to family lore, tribalize the psyche, generate guilt, exercise power, wave a foreign flag, talk in tongues, exchange lies, remember dates and the old days, to be fond of how it was, be angry at what it should be, and weep at why it isn't. — William H Gass

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

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

Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things. — William H Gass

SAY IT. Go ahead, stand before the mirror, look at your mouth, and say it. Blue. See how you pucker up, your lips opening with the consonants into a kiss, and then that final exhalation of vowels? Blue. The word looks like what it is, a syllable blown out into the air, and with the sound and the sight of saying it as one. — William H Gass

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

His father had a dream: to keep his hands forever clean. Joey wasn't clear whether his father had ever understood that it takes a lot of digging in the dirt to do that. — William H Gass

What else is soul but a listener? — William H Gass

He wanted to sink down and hug the coals to his chest. Flamboyant...coins of light...oil, wood, tatters...fumes from acids, soap, smoke...the sunlight shattered. — William H Gass

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. — William H Gass

Getting even is one reason for writing. — William H Gass

More and more I knew my budding world was ruined if he were free in it. As a specimen Mr. Wallace might be my pride. Glory to him in a jar. But free! Better to release the sweet moving tiger or the delicate snake, the monumental elephant. I was just a castaway to be devoured. — William H Gass

Some screw for science only in the afternoon, while others keep their faith with evening - here Orcutt chuckled - it's a matter of light, I understand, but which makes which I can't remember. — William H Gass

Her world must be flat because she disappeared all at once rather than a bit at a time. — William H Gass

Yes, we call it recursive, the act of reading, of looping the loop, of continually returning to an earlier group of words, behaving like Penelope by moving our mind back and forth, forth and back, reweaving what's unwoven, undoing what's been done; and language, which regularly returns us to its origin, which starts us off again on the same journey, older, altered, Columbus one more time, but better prepared each later voyage, knowing a bit more, ready for more, equal to a greater range of tasks, calmer, confident - after all, we've come this way before, have habits that help, and a favoring wind - language like that is the language which takes us inside, inside the sentence - inside - inside the mind - inside - inside, where meanings meet and are modified, reviewed and revised, where no perception, no need, no feeling or thought need be scanted or shunted aside. — William H Gass

Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. — William H Gass

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

If the relation of morality to art were based simply on the demand that art be concerned with values, then almost every author should satisfy it even if he wrote with his prick while asleep. (Puritans will object to the language in that sentence, and feminists to the organ, and neither will admire or even notice how it was phrased.) — William H Gass

It's a simple world for her. A curtain fluttering - that's how she is - lives, moves - obediently, yet with every appearnace of freedom and caprice. — William H Gass

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

And I am in retirement from love. — William H Gass

Perceptions are always profound, associations deceiving. No watermelon tastes red. Apropos: while waiting for a bus once, I saw open down the arm of a midfat, midlife, freckled woman, suitcase tugging at her hand like a small boy needing to pee, a deep blue crack as wide as any in a Roquefort. Split like paper tearing. She said nothing. Stood. Blue bubbled up in the opening like tar. One thing is certain: a cool flute blue tastes like deep well water drunk from a cup. — William H Gass

Poetry is cathartic only for the unserious, for in front of the rush of expressive need stands the barrier of form, and when the hurdler's scissored legs and outstretched arms carry him over the bars, the limp in his life, the headache in his heart, the emptiness he's full of, are as absent as his street-shoes, which will pinch and scrape his feet in all the old leathery ways once the race is over and he has to walk through the front door of his future like a brushman with some feckless patter and a chintzy plastic prize. — William H Gass

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

I'd like to look below my eyes and see not language staring back at me, not sentences or single words or awkward pen lines, but a surface clear and burnished as glass. — William H Gass

If you want to think about something really funny, kiddo, consider the fact that our favorite modern bad guys became villains by serving as heroes first
to millions. It is now a necessary apprenticeship. — William H Gass

Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overhead and inside caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay. Although green enlivens the earth and mixes in the ocean, and we find it, copperish, in fire; green air, green skies, are rare. Gray and brown are widely distributed, but there are no joyful swatches of either, or any of exuberant black, sullen pink, or acquiescent orange. Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling. — William H Gass

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

We were late among the living. — William H Gass

Nipples may be said to resemble the ripest of raspberries or perhaps even a thimble, but "why take the trouble when the trouble taken is so evident," though Gass himself is willing to do it and make it look effortless. Maybe they really look like "the lightly chewed ends of large pencil erasers," and for someone who spends his days at his desk that image can prove surprisingly effective. — William H Gass

I usually have poor to absent relations with editors because they have a habit of desiring changes and I resist changes. — William H Gass

Prospects: a prickly word, a sour betrayer. It was supposed to fill your thoughts with gold, or with clear air and great and lovely distances. Well, the metal came quickly enough to mind, but beards followed shortly, dirt and the deceptions of the desert, biscuits like powdered pumice, tin spoons, stinking mules, clattering cups, stinking water, deceiving air.
...
Prospects. They made him think dirt. They made him think rags, snakes, picks, and the murder of companions. — William H Gass

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

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

And how would he learn his history now? Imagine growing up in a world where only generals and geniuses, empires and companies, had histories, not your own town or grandfather, house or Samantha - none of the things you'd loved. — William H Gass

Ah, but what is form but a bum wipe anyhow? — William H Gass

What we need, of course, is a language which will allow us to distinguish the normal or routine fuck from the glorious, the rare, or the lousy one - a fack from a fick, a fick from a fock - but we have more names for parts of horses than we have for kinds of kisses, and our earthy words are all ... well ... 'dirty'. It says something dirty about us, no doubt, because in a society which had a mind for the body and other similarly vital things, there would be a word for coming down, or going up, words for nibbles on the bias, earlobe loving, and every variety of tongue track. After all, how many kinds of birds do we distinguish? We have a name for the Second Coming but none for a second coming. In fact our entire vocabulary for states of consciousness is critically impoverished. — William H Gass

Every day he thought would last forever, and the night forever, and the dawn drag eternally another long and empty day to light forever; yet they sped away, the day, the night ... — William H Gass

Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy. — William H Gass

Reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers ... annotations, arrows ... an oudine of its design ... very seriously mislead. — William H Gass

A cause is a lie with a fan club. — William H Gass

The censor pretends he is protecting tender hearts, shielding children from sex and violence, keeping the righteous in the right path, guarding against temptation, preserving virtue. How? by burning books, tearing out tongues, stretching necks, stoning women; through torture and imprisonment; by threats of violence against the victim's friends and family; by force-feeding his own people a philosophy not only false and wicked now but false and wicked the day it was first announced by some imaginary lord and used to purchase or preserve his privileges and hoodwink the world. — William H Gass

Excellence is inconveniently difficult. — William H Gass

Look: if a bird were to rub its beak on a limb, you'd hear it - sure - and if a piece of water were to move an unaccustomed way, you'd feel it - that's right - and if a fox were to steal a hen, you'd see-you'd see it - even in the middle of the night; but, heaven help you, if a friend a friend - god - were to slit your throat with his - his love - hoh, you'd bleed a week to notice it. — William H Gass

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

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. — William H Gass

So it's true: Being without Being is blue. — William H Gass

Seldom was blue for blue's sake present till Pollock hurled pigment at his canvas like pies. — William H Gass

So if hunger provokes wailing and wailing brings the breast; if the breast permits sucking and milk suggests its swallow; if swallowing issues in sleep and stomachy comfort, then need, ache, message, object, act, and satisfaction are soon associated like charms on a chain; shortly our wants begin to envision the things which well reduce them, and the organism is finally said to wish. — William H Gass

If you were a fully realized person-whatever the hell that would be-you wouldn't fool around writing books. — William H Gass

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

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

The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words. — William H Gass

Nature punishes gluttony, not avarice or hate. — William H Gass

The ladies egged him on; in Eve's name, they dared him; so he made love with discreet verbs and light nouns, delicate conjunctions. They begged; they defied him to define ... define everything. They could not be scandalized - impossible, they said. Indecent prepositions such as in, on, up, merely made them smile, and the roundest exclamation broke upon them like a bubble's kiss, a butterfly's. Smooth and creamy adjectives enabled them to lick their lips upon the crudest story. How charmingly you speak, Reverend Furber, how much you've seen of this wicked world, and how alive you are to it, they said. — William H Gass

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store. — William H Gass

Surely it's better to live in the country, to live on a prairie by a drawing of rivers, in Iowa or Illinois or Indiana, say, than in any city, in any stinking fog of human beings, in any blooming orchard of machines. It ought to be. — William H Gass

Happiness is just a priest who reads us words of consolation while we walk up the steps to the hangman. — William H Gass

Still, the days were endurable and came and went like breath with only a few deep heaves to harm the pace. — William H Gass

We must take our sentences seriously, which means we must understand them philosophically, and the odd thing is that the few who do, who take them with utter sober seriousness, the utter sober seriousness of right-wing parsons and political saviors, the owners of Pomeranians, are the liars who want to be believed, the novelists and poets, who know that the creatures they imagine have no other being than the sounding syllables which the reader will speak into his own weary and distracted head. There are no magic words. To say the words is magical enough. — William H Gass

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

If someone asks me, "Why do you write?" I can reply by pointing out that it is a very dumb question. Nevertheless, there is an answer. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard. And if someone asks me the inevitable next dumb question, "Why do you write the way you do?" I must answer that I wish to make my hatred acceptable because my hatred is much of me, if not the best part. Writing is a way of making the writer acceptable to the world - every cheap, dumb, nasty thought, every despicable desire, every noble sentiment, every expensive taste. — William H Gass

We have scarcely gotten home ... when our children's sneezes greet us, skinned knees bleed after waiting all day to do so. There is the bellyache and the burned-out basement bulb, the stalled car and the incontinent cat. The windows frost, the toilets sweat, the body of our spouse is one cold shoulder and the darkness of our bedroom is soon full of the fallen shadows of our failures. — William H Gass

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

Honey, you are a baby in this world and don't know how to howl yet. — William H Gass

Works of art are meant to be lived with and loved, and if we try to understand them, we should try to understand them as we try to understand anyone - in order to know them better, not in order to know something else. — William H Gass

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

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

Sing of disappointments more repeated than the batter of the sea, of lives embittered by resentments so ubiquitous the ocean's salt seems thinly shaken, of letdowns local as the sofa where I copped my freshman's feel, of failures as frequent as first love, first nights, last stands; do not warble of arms or adventurous deeds or shepherds playing on their private fifes, or of civil war or monarchies at swords; consider rather the slightly squinkered clerk, the soul which has become as shabby and soiled in its seat as worn-out underwear, a life lit like a lonely room and run like a laddered stocking. — William H Gass

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