Life Sentences Quotes

“And we are often more emotionally comfortable with a world that’s alive even when it happens to be kicking. Animal magnetism is a date drug, good looks are everything, and diamonds are forever. But we need calendars and clocks so all of us will get to work on time and keep the company of men a company. There is around us, as there once were gods, legions of invisibles with rules and regulations that it isn’t wise to flout. Seas rise and suns explode; viruses lurk and whales talk. A billion messages trouble the atmosphere and no one reads the urgent ones. Once we were a will within a world of wills; now we are a weed in a wall of indifference.”
― William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts

“They are merely partaking of the evolutionary miracle found most obviously in man, but not necessarily any more useful to his survival than a raven’s, or a cat’s, or a chimp’s is to its.”
― William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts

“it strikes me that the spirit of the Fourth, this year, was used up by September's end and fell like an early leaf.”
― William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts