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 ALVAREZIn [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.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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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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Divorce transforms habit into drama.
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I’m good at reading people.
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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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I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
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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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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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The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
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It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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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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Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
AL ALVAREZ