Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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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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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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The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
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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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I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
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I’m good at reading people.
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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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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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It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
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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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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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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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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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When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
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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.
AL ALVAREZ






