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 ALVAREZPerhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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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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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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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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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Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
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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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When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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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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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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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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Divorce transforms habit into drama.
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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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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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