William S. Wilson Quotes & Sayings

Passionless is vulgar ("Metier: Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka") — William S. Wilson

It's my side. I have found the pain. It is in my side, and I isolate it and define it, and arrange the other pains around it. I tell myself that pain is information, that I am learning to map the spaces of my own body. Then my body's feelings cascade toward my side, and pain pours over its outlines and erases them. ("Marriage") — William S. Wilson

The stories of young men searching for their fathers are the stories of young men who through their adventures father themselves by doing for themselves what they hoped a father would do for them. ("Anthropology: What Is Lost In Rotation") — William S. Wilson

Evolution propels itself by an inclination toward its next probable achievement." ("Desire") — William S. Wilson

The infinitesimal seedlings became a forest of trees that grew courteously, correcting the distances between themselves as they shaped themselves to the promptings of available light and moisture, tempering the climate and the temperaments of the Scots, as the driest land became moist and the wettest land became dry, seedlings finding a mean between extremes, and the trees constructing a moderate zone for themselves even into what I would have called tundra, until I understood the fact that Aristotle taught, while walking in a botanic garden, that the middle is fittest to discern the extremes. ("Interim") — William S. Wilson

Comparisons deplete the actuality of the things compared ... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read") — William S. Wilson

I find no reason to think that aging is genetically determined. Genes do not provide information for the development of the individual beyond growth and the reproductive process in which the genes are transmitted to the next generation. Once past the reproductive stage, the individual has served the purposes of preservation of the species, and then he is on his own. The wrinkled human face is the victim of gravity and of cumulative errors in the reproduction of cells. Since aging is not programed, but is a badly improvised interference with youthful beauty, we have improvised an operation to counteract its effects. Aging is a form of misinformation. If we get the facts right, you will be able to read it in our faces. ("Motherhood") — William S. Wilson

Every problem of medicine is a problem of language, and this operation was a malapropism. — William S. Wilson

Psychological motivation is the desire to change relations between two points, and so psychology is the study of equations with two unbound variables. ("America: Three Audiences") — William S. Wilson

The woman who undergoes this operation can sense the morphogenetic field at work in her face. She can feel the lines of force as they guide the embryonic cells into the patterns they must form. Why should a woman let her life be determined by tired collagens or by a shortage of zinc which weakens her electromagnetic field, the matrix of life? The goal of life is living. Life is a field of opportunity, guiding the individual forward along paths created by the meshed forces or objective possibilities as they interweave with a person's own potentialities. And this philosophy of life is now bodied forth in the faces of beautiful women. (Motherhood — William S. Wilson