When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
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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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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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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The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
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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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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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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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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It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
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Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
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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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Divorce transforms habit into drama.
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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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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.
AL ALVAREZ