“My illness is alive, the threats to my life are real; yet it is only my death I feel, only the lessening made by my own loss. I am gone, Kohler, right now; and who is so dead as one so dead to a moment of life that life can't raise him up? Not to be here, not to see tomorrow—which, when I see it I shall find as stupid and empty as I found today—is appalling, Kohler, appalling… to slip into the insignificance of history like a thought held in a dream…”

— William H. Gass , book The Tunnel

Source: The Tunnel (1995), p. 250

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William H. Gass 16

Fiction writer, critic, philosophy professor 1924–2017

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Context: I wanted to be strong. I never wanted to be weak again as long as I lived. I thought about my mother and her suicide and I thought about how my father could not tell whether she was dead or alive.
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