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 ALVAREZWhen neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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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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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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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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I’m good at reading people.
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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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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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I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
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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 point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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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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Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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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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