It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
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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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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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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Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
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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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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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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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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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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Divorce transforms habit into drama.
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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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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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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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I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
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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.
AL ALVAREZ