58+ William H. Gass Quotes On Education, Slavery And War

William H. Gass is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic. He is best known for his novel The Tunnel, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1995. Gass is also known for his essays and criticism, which often focus on topics such as language, literature, and philosophy. Following is our collection on famous quotes by William H. Gass on education, slavery, war.

Top 10 William H. Gass Quotes

1. The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.
2. it is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.
3. Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.
4. For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.
5. Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.
6. The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.
7. 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.
8. For the speedy reader paragraphs become a country the eye flies over looking for landmarks, reference points, airports, restrooms, passages of sex.
9. Philosophy has a great sort of appeal in terms of an artistic or aesthetic organization of concepts. It's a conceptual art.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.
• Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.
• When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid.
• Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.
• What one wants to do with stories is screw them up.
• I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.
• The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.
• Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal
• Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.
• What else is soul but a listener?

William H. Gass Quotes About World

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

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

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

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

William H. Gass Quotes About Love

Of course there is enough to stir our wonder anywhere; there's enough to love, anywhere, if one is strong enough, if one is diligent enough, if one is perceptive, patient, kind enough -- whatever it takes. — 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

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

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

William H. Gass Quotes About Writing

It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word — William H. Gass

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard. — 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

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

Getting even is one reason for writing. — 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

William H. Gass Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

I do think of my reader, or listener, really, more often, if I give a lecture, for example, and I know that I'm talking to these people; I enjoy sort of preening them a bit. But it's a matter of decorum, basically. — 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 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

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

How do we know, then, when a code's been cracked?when we are right?when do we know if we have even received a message? Why, naturally, when, upon one set of substitutions, sense emerges like the outline under a rubbing; when a single tentative construal leads to several; when all the sullen letters of the code cry TEAM! after YEA! has been, by several hands, uncovered. — 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

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

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

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

Some people say their life is full of darkness and I wonder why they don't just try and switch the lights on. — 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

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

[As] authorities "over" us are removed, as we wobble out on our own, the question of whether to be or not to be arises with real relevance for the first time, since the burden of being is felt most fully by the self-determining self. — William H. Gass

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

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

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off. — 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

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

Life Lessons by William H. Gass

1. William H. Gass emphasizes the importance of language and its power to shape our understanding of the world. He encourages readers to pay attention to the nuances of language and its ability to convey complex ideas.
2. His writing often explores the beauty of language and its capacity to evoke emotion, as well as the power of storytelling to create meaning.
3. By reading Gass's work, we can learn to appreciate the subtlety and complexity of language, and to use it as a tool for self-expression and understanding.