The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
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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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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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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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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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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Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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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.
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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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Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
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The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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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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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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Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
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It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
AL ALVAREZ