Quotes from William H. Gass

The novel does not say, it shows; it shows me my life in a figure: it compels me to stare at my toes.

The hurt heart heals, but the healed heart still hurts. -- From "Exile" in Finding a Form

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

A book is like a deck of windows

We have a name for the Second Coming but none for a second coming.

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.

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

My stories are malevolently anti-narrative, and my essays are maliciously anti-expository, but the ideology of my opposition arrived long after my antagonism had become a trait of character." -- William H. Gass, "Finding a Form

Those hundreds of feet were light. In washing them off, I pretended the hose was a pump. What have I missed? Childhood is a lie of poetry.

Here is history seen, endured, and created at the same time….. If you believe only that which you know to be true, you will trouble yourself with very little belief." On Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War" in "Fifty Literary Pillars".

They are merely partaking of the evolutionary miracle found most obviously in man, but not necessarily any more useful to his survival than a raven's, or a cat's, or a chimp's is to its.

She crowds each moment with endeavor.

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.

Such a person has no place. He can't be found. He's like one of those unphysical things they talk about in science now–like one of those things that's moving, you know, always moving on, but through no space.

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?

Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.

They try to thrive. To multiply. To make murder a method of management.

This Midwest. A dissonance of parts and people, we are a consonance of Towns. Like a man grown fat in everything but heart, we overlabor; our outlook never really urban, never rural either, we enlarge and linger at the same time, as Alice both changed and remained in her story.

no one could say, looking at her lined, pale and puffy face, the shapeless garish sack she had double-pinned around her, or the misfocusing eyes and slack wet mouth, that she had led the right life, and she knew it, not even with Freud's fist could she repress that...

Excellence is inconveniently difficult.

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

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.

Joseph thought he knew the plants that had sought out the twitterers, and those that had risen for the wren, or a fern that turned, not to the sun, but toward the chatter of the chickadee, so quick were the petals of its song, so sharp so plentiful so light, so showy in their symmetry, so suddenly in shade.

Few of the stories one has it in one's self to speak get spoken, because the heart rarely confesses to intelligence its deeper needs; and few of the stories one has at the top of one's head to tell get told, because the mind does not always possess the voice for them. Even when the voice is there, and the tongue is limber as if with liquor or with love, where is that sensitive, admiring, other pair of ears?