When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
AL ALVAREZWhen neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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Divorce transforms habit into drama.
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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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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He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.
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I’m good at reading people.
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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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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist.
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In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets’ nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.
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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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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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In the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.
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Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
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