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 ALVAREZHe pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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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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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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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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Divorce transforms habit into drama.
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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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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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When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
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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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Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
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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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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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Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
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I’m good at reading people.
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