Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
AL ALVAREZDespair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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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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Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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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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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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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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Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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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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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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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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.
AL ALVAREZ