Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
AL ALVAREZNo man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
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You pause and attend: the heart beats in your chest; outside, the trees are thick with new leaves, a swallow dips over them, the light moves, people are going about their business.
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When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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Hold’em is a game of calculated aggression. If your cards are good enough for you to call a bet, they are good enough to raise with.
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It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
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The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
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Seemed merely a temporary halt on my steady descent through layer after layer of depression, like an elevator stopping for a moment on the way down to the basement.
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It is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it’s funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.
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When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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To put yourself into a situation where a mistake cannot necessarily be recouped, where the life you lose may be your own, clears the head wonderfully.
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Since what happened in them was beyond the imagination, it was therefore also beyond art and all those human values on which art is traditionally based.
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Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
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Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
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The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
AL ALVAREZ