Omensetter's Luck Quotes

“I don't know myself, what to do, where to go... I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort... it's what the world offers... please leave me alone to dream as I fancy.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“...yes, words were superior; they maintained a superior control; they touched without your touching; they were at once the bait, the hook, the line, the pole, and the water in between.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“Look: if a bird were to rub its beak on a limb, you’d hear it—sure—and if a piece of water were to move an unaccustomed way, you’d feel it—that’s right—and if a fox were to steal a hen, you’d see-you’d see it—even in the middle of the night; but, heaven help you, if a friend a friend—god—were to slit your throat with his—his love—hoh, you’d bleed a week to notice it.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“Why have You made us the saddest animal? (...) He cannot do it, Henry, that is why. He can’t continue us. All He can do is try to make us happy that we die. Really, He’s a pretty good fellow.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“Every day he thought would last forever, and the night forever, and the dawn drag eternally another long and empty day to light forever; yet they sped away, the day, the night...”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“How fares the thumb, boy? well? Aye, merry, ’tis the sign of the penis. With the women, look you, observe the ear. The parts appear and come together. So obesity and malice. So grumbling and nagging. So gossip, envy, spite, and avarice. Slowly settling into. So feminine weakness. Heartless piety. Savage morals. They come together. No more goody geedge. Ruthless, lifelong revenge. Zrrr. Grease in a cold pan. Stay off from gingerly lobed and delicately whorled ones. Thus appear the parts. Mind your uncle, boy, who knows. And the men then. Lewd speech and slovenly habits. And the peasant’s suspicion, his cruelty and rancor, his anger, drunkenness, pig-headed ignorance and bestiality. Inevitable they should be parts. Hoolyhoohoo. All in the normal course of nature. And they were saying we had evolved. What did it mean? But, he said in a voice that was clearly audible, I protest this world of unilluminated cocks. He caught the sense of his own words—so absurd—and his body began to shake—half in laughter, half in despair.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“And how would he learn his history now? Imagine growing up in a world where only generals and geniuses, empires and companies, had histories, not your own town or grandfather, house or Samantha—none of the things you’d loved.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“For suppose, and mind it narrowly, that life is simply a shadow bodies cast inside themselves when struck by all those queerly various bits and particles, those pieces, those streams of—what?—of science. Death in such a case would be only another arrangement.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“Why were they whining then?...whining, damn them, whining…
Because they’d have to give up their hope of living like an animal and return to an honest, conscious, human life. The prospect was hard.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“Oh he was like them, like those laced-up ladies—warm from wards. A man, he still chewed the nipple, titillation, and risked no freer, deeper draught. Fearless in speech, he was cowardly in all else…ah, to be rich, luxuriant, episcopal…well, he’d conquered that by flight.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“The ladies egged him on; in Eve's name, they dared him; so he made love with discreet verbs and light nouns, delicate conjunctions. They begged; they defied him to define...define everything. They could not be scandalized—impossible, they said. Indecent prepositions such as in, on, up, merely made them smile, and the roundest exclamation broke upon them like a bubble's kiss, a butterfly's. Smooth and creamy adjectives enabled them to lick their lips upon the crudest story. How charmingly you speak, Reverend Furber, how much you've seen of this wicked world, and how alive you are to it, they said.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“Furber had come in the late fall following that enormous summer, now famous, in which the temperature had hung in the high nineties along the river for weeks, parching the fields, drying and destroying; weeks which had, unmindful of the calendar, fallen undiminished into October so that the leaves shriveled before they fell and fell while green, the river level fell, exposing flat stretches of mud and bottom weed, the Siren Rocks were seen for the first time in twenty years, quite round and disappointingly small, and an unmoving cover of dust lay thickly everywhere, on fields, trees, buildings, on the river itself which crawled beneath it blindly like a mole. -- William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck, p. 97, Penguin Twentieth Century Classics, 1997 (first published by The New American Library 1966).”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“He wanted to sink down and hug the coals to his chest. Flamboyant...coins of light...oil, wood, tatters...fumes from acids, soap, smoke...the sunlight shattered.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“I have never seen the Lord God. But I have seen Absalom alive in the tree.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“His dark room now seemed cool and restfully confining. You could imagine maps in the wallpaper. The roses had faded into vague shells of pink. Only a few silver lines along the vanished stems and in the veins of leaves, indistinct patches of the palest green remained—the faint suggestion of mysterious geography. A grease spot was a marsh, a mountain or a treasure. Irabestis went boating down a crack on cool days, under the tree boughs, bending his head. He fished in a chip of plaster. The perch rose to the bait and were golden in the sunwater. Specks stood for cities; pencil marks were bridges; stains and shutter patterns laid out fields of wheat and oats and corn. In the shadow of a corner the crack issued into a great sea. There was a tear in the paper that looked exactly like a railway and another that signified a range of hills. Some tiny drops of ink formed a chain of lakes. A darker decorative strip of Grecian pediments and interlacing ivy at the ceiling’s edge kept the tribes of Gog and Magog from invasion. Once he had passed through it to the ceiling but it made him dizzy and afraid. Shadows moved quixotically over the whole wall, usually from left to right in tall thin bands, and sank behind the bureau or below the bed or disappeared suddenly in a corner.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“It was his opinion that he had been a boy already, a girl, a plant in the woods, an eagle hunting in the mountains, and had spent, in the ocean, the glancing life of a fish. All the elements, he says, were united in rejecting him. The air had chased him to the sea, and the sea had spat him out on the earth's edge, and the earth had Rung him toward the sun.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“Now he examined the space he intended to preach to. It lay just above an irregular terrain of heads and extended to the gray crossbeams of the nave with their pale dark ax marks and black spots of iron. Beginning at a point in front of him as far as he could leap, it reached through crisscrossing blades of light to the opposite wall where his melting sight composed the space's outer edge. He could imagine, looking at it, how chaos was before the first word. It was a striped waste, a visibly starless night. Dust, chambered in rods, lazily settled in no direction. Indistinctly he could see the tops of those fleshy cabinets which would compartment hell, while above, spanning the peak, were the long bars of heaven and the perching choirs of love. He thought of his voice passing into it, dust dancing to its tune. There'd be land in the shape of his syllables, a sea singing, sky like an echo, plants in bloom burning with speech, animals with yellow answering eyes, and finally men taking form from the chant of their names and gathering in crowds to enlarge their reply to the laments which had created them.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“The Reverend Furber's designing figure was a slowly circling hawk, its orbits tightening until with shut-up wings, it dropped. Only the quietness was out of place. In his plan there was no quietness. Rather he would make them like the windings of hell, noisy with flame. He had in mind to preach a series, each one a wind of hell, a circle of the hawk, a coil of snake. He paced the room, his body rocking, shouting at God. Always, too, he fought to keep that one bright image out: he standing, she beside. He fought it furiously. He damned the meadow grass that seemed to lie along his cheek all night and the stream that ran like music through him, his voice growing hoarse, lost in his composing, yet always fighting the cool sweet air, the devilish calm, the loosening that followed him. On his shoulder, sometimes, these sensations seemed. Up his sleeves he found he must pursue them, through his clothing, underarms—air like the first of spring, infinitely promising. Then he would shout, writhing, his hands hunting them like crawling things, clawing through his clothes, striking at space, pounding against his ears until he thought the drums would break. All this until he was exhausted and he fell in pillows, hiding his face. Up again his arm described a circle. He floated out, alight behind his glowing eyes, the hawk, predatory of mice.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“He'd fled his childhood here, all those flowers and sweet honey, his fears, the evil smell of ink, the shriek of print ... no use. The wealthy women he was presently imagining would love as much exhibiting their naked souls as their naked bodies, and Furber was aware that he himself as often in his dreams found a naked soul to be a naked body that he took them now together in one glance. For terror you looked to the teeth. Rage lay in the muscles of the legs and arms, hypocrisy weighed on the lids of the eyes, while other dishonesties rang around the pupils like shoes thrown true to the stake.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“Have you inspected Mrs. Pimber's fruit cellar, Matthew? I expect you'll find him there, heels up, in a stone jar—preserved. Oh yes. Positively Egyptian. Or perhaps she put him up in parts, year after year, as pieces broke off. Who knows how many of each? Easy—mind now—take it easy. Don't misunderstand. We've had enough of that. But it's important that you see them: quarts of feet and fingers over there-a new batch, the caps are clean and shiny—then jams of liver and kidney jellies, brains and lungs like cauliflowers floating halfway up their jars, eyebuds bleached like little onions or, if bloodshot, like baby beets—oh no, I hold my hands up to you—you've got to take the tour, why, it's instructive—brains, did I say?—well such a store: glands and tongues and teeth like white corn, pearly ear lobes and lips in soft pink sauce, crocks of pickled pricks- So, Matthew, now it's your turn to flinch.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“Cruelty brought no relief, as sight did not, and yet he sometimes thought his pain might simply be the pain of his shedding, since it often seemed that he was sloughing like a snake the skins of all his seasons; his white fats and red flesh were lost in a luminous wash. Sunshine lapped at him, rose over him, and soon there were pieces of him drifting off—his head like a hat, legs like logs. Then gently he toweled his bones until they shone. They made a fair tree; they weren't so bad.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“The girls swung in graceful turns around the hole, their dresses palely visible. His eyes are like emeralds, they said. They are green emeralds and yellow gold. That's because they're borrowed from the fire at the center of the earth and they see like signals through the dark. Then Omensetter told them of foxes' eyes: how they burn the bark from trees, put spells on dogs, blind hens, and melt the coldest snow. To Henry, kneeling gingerly upon a rotten board, they were dim points of red, and his heart contracted at the sight of their malice.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“They would sit in the boat and fish in the river. The trees hung over and shaded the sides. They would drift in and out of the shade, eddying with the river, watching the cork float, their broad hats tilted, shading their eyes. It would be pleasantly cool in the shady places where the roots of the willows and the beeches came mossy to the riverside, and the water was black by the boat. They would get caught up in a curl of the river, the water still and black by the boat, until Lloyd would reach up and pull on a limb and the boat would coast out into the sun again where the water sparkled and slapped gently against the hull. It was warm and comfortable and there weren't many fish, but just slow and easy drifting down the checkered river.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“..when I was a little boy and learning letters — A ..., B ..., C ..., love was never taught to me, I couldn't spell it, the O was always missing, or the V, so I wrote love like live, or lure, or late, or law, or liar.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“Then Jethro Furber wondered whether Omensetter wasn't an actor.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“The thought turned him topsy-turvy. It seemed to summarize the whole worthless way of the world--if there was one. And versions of it began to flutter wildly through his head. You have to look round to see straight. Good enough. Useful. And the rough places plain. But all that's geometry. But it measures the earth. You have to go slow to catch up. Eat to get thin? no, but fast to grow fat, that was a fine one. Then lose to win? fail to succeed? Risky. Stop to begin. The form made noiseless music--lumly lum lum or lum-lee-lee lum--like fill to empty, every physical extreme. Die to live was a bit old hat. But default to repay. And lie to be honest. He liked the ring of that. Flack! I'm white in order to be black. Sin first and saint later. Cruel to be kind, of course, and the hurts in the hurter--that's what they say--a lot of blap. That's my name, my nomination: Saint Later. Now then: humble to be proud; poor to be rich. Enslave to make free? That moved naturally. Also multiply to subtract. Dee dee dee. Young Saint Later. A list of them, as old as Pythagoras had. Even engenders odd. How would that be? Eight is five and three. There were no middle-aged saints--they were all old men or babies. Ah, god--the wise fool. The simpleton sublime. Babe in the woods, roach in the pudding, prince in the pauper, enchanted beauty in the toad. This was the wisdom of the folk and the philosopher alike--the disorder of the lyre, or the drawn-out bow of that sane madman, the holy Heraclitus. The poet Zeno. The logician Keats. Discovery after discovery: the more the mice eat, the fatter the cats. There were tears and laughter, for instance--how they shook and ran together into one gay grief. Dumb eloquence, swift still waters, shallow deeps. Let's see: impenitent remorse, careless anxiety, heedless worry, tense repose. So true of tigers. Then there was the friendly enmity of sun and snow, and the sweet disharmony of every union, the greasy mate of cock and cunt, the cosmic poles, war that's peace, the stumble that's an everlasting poise and balance, spring and fall, love, strife, health, disease, and the cold duplicity of Number One and all its warm divisions. The sameness that's in difference. The limit that's limitless. The permanence that's change. The distance of the near at home. So--to roam, stay home. Then pursue to be caught, submit to conquer. Method--ancient--of Chinese. To pacify, inflame. Love, hate. Kiss, kill. In, out, up, down, start, stop. Ah . . . from pleasure, pain. Like circumcision of the heart. Judgement and mercy. Sin and grace. It little mattered; everything seemed to Furber to be magically right, and his heart grew fat with satisfaction. Therefore there is good in every evil; one must lower away to raise; seek what's found to mourn its loss; conceive in stone and execute in water; turn profound and obvious, miraculous and commonplace, around; sin to save; destroy in order to create; live in the sun, though underground. Yes. Doubt in order to believe--that was an old one--for this the square IS in the circle. O Phaedo, Phaedo. O endless ending. Soul is immortal after all--at last it's proved. Between dead and living there's no difference but the one has whiter bones. Furber rose, the mosquitoes swarming around him, and ran inside.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“Some screw for science only in the afternoon, while others keep their faith with evening—here Orcutt chuckled—it's a matter of light, I understand, but which makes which I can't remember.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“He could have set fire to it, the garden was dry enough, and burned it clean—privet, vines, and weeds; but he waited in his rooms through the winter instead, weeping and dreaming.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“Rancorous ivy. On the other side of the wall, at the edge of the river, the sand burned. The river lay afire. Kingfishers fell like spots across the eyes and laughter was yellow. Every Sunday Omensetter strolled by the river with his wife, his daughters, and his dog. They came by wagon, spoke to people who were off to church, and while Furber preached, they sprawled in the gravel and trailed their feet in the water. Lucy Omensetter lay her swollen body on a flat rock. Furber felt the sun lapping at her ears. It was like a rising blush, and his hands trembled when he held them out to make the bars of the cross. May the Lord bless you and keep you . . . He closed his eyes, drifting off. They would see how moved he was, how intense and sincere he was. Cause His light to shine upon you . . . He would find the footprints of the dog and imprint of their bodies. All the days of your life . . . The brazen parade of her infected person. Watchman. Rainbows like rings of oil around her. Watchman. Shouldn’t we be? I spy you, Fatty, behind the tree. He wanted to rub the memory from his eyes. Glittering. Beads of water stood on her skin and drop fled into drop until they broke and ran, the streaks finally fading. Her navel was inside out—sweet spot where Zeus had tied her. She was so white and glistening, so . . . pale, though darker about the eyes, the nipples dark. Open us to evil. He made a slit in his lids. Burn our hearts. Shawls of sunlight spilled over the backs of the pews. Nay-ked-nessss. The droplets gathered at the point of her elbow and hung there, the sac swelling until it fell and spattered on her foot. Nay . . . nay. To enclose her like the water of the creek had closed her. Nay . . . Proper body for a lover. Joy to be a stone. Please, the peep-watch is over. Please hurry now. Hurry. Get out of my church.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck