Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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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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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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Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
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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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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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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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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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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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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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When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
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When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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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 possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.
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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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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.
AL ALVAREZ