Middle C Quotes

“The things that stayed were things that didn't matter except they stayed, night and day, all seasons the same, and were peaceful to a fault and boded no ill but thought well enough of themselves to repeat their presences.”
― William H. Gass, Middle C

“Honey, you are a baby in this world and don't know how to howl yet.”
― William H. Gass, Middle C

“Nevertheless, it would be prudent to remain concerned. For, like death, IT would come: Armageddon. There would be-without exaggeration-a series of catastrophes. As a consequence of the evil in man...-no mere virus, however virulent, was even a burnt match for our madness, our unconcern, our cruelty-...there would arise a race of champions, predators of humans: namely earthquakes, eruptions, tidal waves, tornados, typhoons, hurricanes, droughts-the magnificent seven. Floods, winds, fires, slides. The classical elements, only angry. Oceans would warm, the sky boil and burn, the ice cap melt, the seas rise. Rogue nations, like kids killing kids at their grammar school, would fire atomic-hydrogen-neutron bombs at one another. Smallpox would revive, or out of the African jungle would slide a virus no one understood. Though reptilian only in spirit, the disease would make us shed our skins like snakes and, naked to the nerves, we'd expire in a froth of red spit. Markets worldwide would crash as reckless cars on a speedway do, striking the wall and rebounding into one another, hurling pieces of themselves at the spectators in the stands. With money worthless-that last faith lost-the multitude would riot, race against race at first, God against God, the gots against the gimmes. Insects hardened by generations of chemicals would consume our food, weeds smother our fields, fire ants, killer bees sting us while we're fleeing into refuge water, where, thrashing we would drown, our pride a sodden wafer. Pestilence. War. Famine. A cataclysm of one kind or another-coming-making millions of migrants. Wearing out the roads. Foraging in the fields. Looting the villages. Raping boys and women. There'd be no tent cities, no Red Cross lunches, hay drops. Deserts would appear as suddenly as patches of crusty skin. Only the sun would feel their itch. Floods would sweep suddenly over all those newly arid lands as if invited by the beach. Forest fires would burn, like those in coal mines, for years, uttering smoke, making soot for speech, blackening every tree leaf ahead of their actual charring. Volcanoes would erupt in series, and mountains melt as though made of rock candy till the cities beneath them were caught inside the lava flow where they would appear to later eyes, if there were any eyes after, like peanuts in brittle. May earthquakes jelly the earth, Professor Skizzen hotly whispered. Let glaciers advance like motorboats, he bellowed, threatening a book with his fist. These convulsions would be a sign the parasites had killed their host, evils having eaten all they could; we'd hear a groan that was the going of the Holy Ghost; we'd see the last of life pissed away like beer from a carouse; we'd feel a shudder move deeply through this universe of dirt, rock, water, ice, and air, because after its long illness the earth would have finally died, its engine out of oil, its sky of light, winds unable to catch a breath, oceans only acid; we'd be witnessing a world that's come to pieces bleeding searing steam from its many wounds; we'd hear it rattling its atoms around like dice in a cup before spilling randomly out through a split in the stratosphere, night and silence its place-well-not of rest-of disappearance. My wish be willed, he thought. Then this will be done, he whispered so no God could hear him. That justice may be served, he said to the four winds that raged in the corners of his attic.”
― William H. Gass, Middle C

“Joseph thought he knew the plants that had sought out the twitterers, and those that had risen for the wren, or a fern that turned, not to the sun, but toward the chatter of the chickadee, so quick were the petals of its song, so sharp so plentiful so light, so showy in their symmetry, so suddenly in shade.”
― William H. Gass, Middle C

“Still, the days were endurable and came and went like breath with only a few deep heaves to harm the pace.”
― William H. Gass, Middle C

“If you are terrified of being a bore you probably are a bore and terror should be on its way. But Skizzen had become bored by himself, even alone in the urinal, so what must he be to others? Was terror transferable? He believed it was—contagious, like panic. There were books that argued for it. If you could not hear what you were about to play before you played it; if you could not measure the intervals to come, had no grasp of the constellations that notes and not-notes formed; then fear would fill your fingers as though they were sucking straws. When he faced his first class, he heard his words toddle from his mouth, their sense of conviction tied to a string for handy retraction. He would look in wonder at his notes, “If you could not hear what you were about to play before you played it; if you could not measure the intervals to come, had no grasp of the constellations that notes and not-notes formed; then fear would fill your fingers as though they were sucking straws. When he faced his first class, he heard his words toddle from his mouth, their sense of conviction tied to a string for handy retraction. He would look in wonder at his notes, notes both musical and expository, that suddenly meant nothing to him.”
― William H. Gass, Middle C

“The young professor never took the right tone with his material because he didn't know the right tone to take. You have no tone, he scolded himself. You have no real beliefs. Of what, about your subject, could you say you were sure? if you were put to the lie-detect? if you had to swear before a court?”
― William H. Gass, Middle C

“His father had a dream: to keep his hands forever clean. Joey wasn't clear whether his father had ever understood that it takes a lot of digging in the dirt to do that.”
― William H. Gass, Middle C