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 ALVAREZSince 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.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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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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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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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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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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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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When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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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.
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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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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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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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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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