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 ALVAREZIt is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it’s funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
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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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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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The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
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The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
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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 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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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.
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I’m good at reading people.
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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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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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Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
AL ALVAREZ