Divorce transforms habit into drama.
AL ALVAREZIn the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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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.
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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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Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
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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.
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Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
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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 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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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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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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The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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I’m good at reading people.
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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.
AL ALVAREZ