146 Quotes by William H. Gass

I cannot estimate how much this pleases me. I feel I have succeeded to the idleness of God.

it strikes me that the spirit of the Fourth, this year, was used up by September's end and fell like an early leaf.

...reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers...annotations, arrows...an oudine of its design...very seriously mislead.

So it's true: Being without Being is blue.

If the relation of morality to art were based simply on the demand that art be concerned with values, then almost every author should satisfy it even if he wrote with his prick while asleep. (Puritans will object to the language in that sentence, and feminists to the organ, and neither will admire or even notice how it was phrased.)

Prospects: a prickly word, a sour betrayer. It was supposed to fill your thoughts with gold, or with clear air and great and lovely distances. Well, the metal came quickly enough to mind, but beards followed shortly, dirt and the deceptions of the desert, biscuits like powdered pumice, tin spoons, stinking mules, clattering cups, stinking water, deceiving air....Prospects. They made him think dirt. They made him think rags, snakes, picks, and the murder of companions.

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".

it is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.

time cannot do to ordinary things what we timelessly do to one another.