Literature-in-translation Quotes by William H. Gass

1 Literature-in-translation quote by William H. Gass

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“As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.”

William H. Gass

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“Try to remember that artists in these catastrophic times, along with the serious scientists, are the only salvation for us, if there is to…

William H. Gass

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“If someone asks me, “Why do you write?” I can reply by pointing out that it is a very dumb question. Nevertheless, there is an answer. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard. And if someone asks me the inevitable next dumb question, “Why do you write the way you do?” I must answer that I wish to make…

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…

William H. Gass

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When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid.

William H. Gass

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Getting even is one reason for writing.

William H. Gass

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“It's a simple world for her. A curtain fluttering - that's how she is - lives, moves - obediently, yet with every appearnace of…

William H. Gass

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“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…

William H. Gass

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“Yes, we call it recursive, the act of reading, of looping the loop, of continually returning to an earlier group of words, behaving like Penelope by moving our mind back and forth, forth and back, reweaving what’s unwoven, undoing what’s been done; and language, which regularly returns us to its origin, which starts us off again on the same journey,…

William H. Gass

“Then let us have a language worthy of our world, a democratic style where rich and well-born nouns can roister with some sluttish verb yet find themselves content and uncomplained of. We want a diction which contains the quaint, the rare, the technical, the obsolete, the old, the lent, the nonce, the local slang and argot of the street, in…

William H. Gass

“Excellence is inconveniently difficult.”

William H. Gass

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We must take our sentences seriously, which means we must understand them philosophically, and the odd thing is that the few who do, who take them with utter sober seriousness, the utter sober seriousness of right-wing parsons and political saviors, the owners of Pomeranians, are the liars who want to be believed, the novelists and poets, who know that the…

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…

William H. Gass

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