He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.
AL ALVAREZDivorce transforms habit into drama.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
-
-
Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
AL ALVAREZ -
The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
AL ALVAREZ -
The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
AL ALVAREZ -
in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.
AL ALVAREZ -
No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ -
When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ -
Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights.
AL ALVAREZ -
Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
AL ALVAREZ -
It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ -
I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
AL ALVAREZ -
The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
AL ALVAREZ