“O, Koh, the limerick is the unrefiner's fire. It is as false and lifeless, as anonymous, as a rubber snake, a Dixie cup. It is indeed the dildo of desire! No one ever found a thought in one. No one ever found a helpful hint concerning life, a consoling sense. The feelings it harbors are the cold, the bitter, dry ones: scorn contempt, disdain, disgust. Yes. Yet for that reason, nothing is more civilized than this simple form. -pg 177”
The Tunnel (1995)
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William H. Gass 16
Fiction writer, critic, philosophy professor 1924–2017Related quotes

One Word is Too Often Profaned http://www.readprint.com/work-1370/Percy-Bysshe-Shelley (1821), st. 1

From Nothing Personal, a collaboration with the photographer Richard Avedon (1964). Baldwin's text for the volume can be found " here https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1042&context=cibs".
Context: One must say Yes to life, and embrace it wherever it is found - and it is found in terrible places. … For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

“We console ourselves with several friends for not having found one real one.”
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Friendship

“He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.”

“Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person.”