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.
AL ALVAREZNo man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
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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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Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
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The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
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Divorce transforms habit into drama.
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I’m good at reading people.
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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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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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The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
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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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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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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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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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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