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 ALVAREZYou 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.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
-
-
It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
AL ALVAREZ -
I’m good at reading people.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ -
I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
AL ALVAREZ -
Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
AL ALVAREZ -
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 ALVAREZ -
Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ -
When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
AL ALVAREZ -
The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
AL ALVAREZ -
The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
AL ALVAREZ -
Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ -
I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ