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.

— William H. Gass

William H. Gass Quotes

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

— William H. Gass

I dreamed my lips would drift down your back like a skiff on a river. I’d follow a vein with the point of my finger, hold your bare feet in my naked hands.

— William H. Gass

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.

— William H. Gass

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.

— William H. Gass

Excellence is inconveniently difficult.

— 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

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

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.

— William H. Gass

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.

— William H. Gass

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

— William H. Gass

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.

— William H. Gass

She crowds each moment with endeavor.

— 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

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.

— William H. Gass

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

— William H. Gass

The hurt heart heals, but the healed heart still hurts. – From “Exile” in Finding a Form.

— William H. Gass

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.

— William H. Gass

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

— William H. Gass

A book is like a deck of windows.

— William H. Gass

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.

— William H. Gass
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