Quotes from William H. Gass

Why have You made us the saddest animal? (...) He cannot do it, Henry, that is why. He can't continue us. All He can do is try to make us happy that we die. Really, He's a pretty good fellow.

The responsibility of any science, any pure pursuit, is ultimately to itself, and on this point physics, philosophy, and poetry unite with Satan in their determination not to serve. Any end is higher than utility, when ends are up.

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.

The real subject of On Being Blue is language itself, which he sees as glorious to the exact degree that it is also inadequate, unable to sustain an immediate relation between a word on the one hand and its arbitrary and yet indissoluble referent on the other. All words are figurative; no blue is ever just blue.

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

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.

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

until summer becomes ein Zimmer in einem Traum -- a room in a dream.

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

Of course, in philosophy, you settle one bill only by neglecting another, a strategy which must eventually fail since all of them fall due at the same time.

Furthermore, the initial page, always crucial, passed every test, with its promises and divisions, its portentous opening paragraph like the great door of a church, its exotic setting and strange names, the rolling orchestration of its prose.

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.

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.

Sing, Susu, through your severed head, through your severed arteries; and I shall put my mouth to your lips as though you were such an instrument. My breath shall reinflate your brain. Susu, O bag of pipes, I approach you in my dreams.

We were late among the living.

I could not shake my point of view, infected as it was, and I took up their study with a manly passion.

I have never seen the Lord God. But I have seen Absalom alive in the tree.

We were late among the living, and by the time God got to us ice was already slipping from the poles as if from an imperfectly decorated cake.

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.

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.

The secret of life is paying absolute attention to what is going on. The enemy of life is distraction. If you're not present in the present, where the hell are you? Word of Wisdom No. 1.

Loneliness is the diary keeper's lover. It is not narcissism that takes them to their desk every day. And who "keeps" whom, after all? The diary is demanding; it imposes its routine; it must be chored the way one must milk a cow; and it alters your attitude toward life, which is lived, finally, only in order that it may makes it way to the private page. [From "Fifty Literary Pillars", p.35]

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.

Simplicity is not a given. It is an achievement, a human invention, a discovery, a beloved belief.