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.
AL ALVAREZDespite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist.
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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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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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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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The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
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Divorce transforms habit into drama.
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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 you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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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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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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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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Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
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Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
AL ALVAREZ