The William H. Gass Reader Quotes

“It is speech which contains all our childhood fantasies, all our primitive and original impulses, our horror shows, our “mother-meanings,” and whatever trips past the Forms we may have taken. And it is the sound of these early words, in the total context of their production, which gives them their emotional power, and connects them so closely with our basic desires.*12 The dark horse is stabled in the child. So the poet, the rhetorician, the philosopher, who thinks of a page as merely a page, and not as a field for the voice; who considers print to be simply print, and does not notice the notes it forms; whose style is disheveled and overcharged with energy or overrun with feeling, or whose frigid and compulsive orderings make the mouth dry; the author who is satisfied to see his words, as though at a distance like sheep on a hillside, and not as concepts coasting like clouds across his consciousness—such a writer will never enter, touch, or move the soul; never fill us with the feeling that he’s seen the Forms, whether or not there are any; never give us that ride up the hill of heaven as Plato has, or the sense that in accepting his words we are accepting a vision.”
― William H Gass, The William H. Gass Reader

“The step seems a small one, but the difference between an imaginary world which flows around the real one and uses it, catch as catch can, and a real world which is hung each way one turns with dreams like evergreens by bagworms, is— And if at first our daydreams merely”
― William H Gass, The William H. Gass Reader

“I once went to bed with a nun by pointing a pistol at one; said she, with a quaver, that’s a good big persuader, but what is the point of the gun?”
― William H Gass, The William H. Gass Reader

“Lust and rage, Yeats rightly said, attend one’s old age.”
― William H Gass, The William H. Gass Reader