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 ALVAREZin 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.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
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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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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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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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Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
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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 better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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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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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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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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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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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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.
AL ALVAREZ