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Top William T Vollmann Quotes

Browse top 42 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by William T Vollmann.

Favorite William T Vollmann Quotes

1. "Life is an extended camping trip. With a leaky, inferior tent one runs no more risk of rain than anyone else; but if it does rain, the person in the cheap tent chances soaking in his sleeping bag, and possibly dying of hypothermia." ~ William T. Vollmann
2. "If this advertisement be not sufficient, I can only protrude my wormlike tendrils of apology, craving forbearance on the grounds that a writer must write about what he knows, and since I know nothing about any subject it scarcely matters where I dabble." ~ William T. Vollmann
3. "Are you a censor? Do you tell people not to say "girl"? Shame on you! If nothing offends you, you're a saint or you're psychotic. If a few things offend you, deal with them--fairly. If you're often offended by things, you're probably a self-righteous asshole and it's too bad you weren't censored yourself--by your mother in an abortion clinic." ~ William T. Vollmann
4. "Such mental haziness is in order, given the delightful vagueness of the terrain." ~ William T. Vollmann
5. "I wish I could go back and rewrite my first book, You Bright and Risen Angels; I could do a better job. But in the meantime, nobody knows as much about my books as I do. Nobody has the right but me to say which words go into my books or get deleted or edited. When I'm dying, I'll smile, knowing I stood up for my books. If I die with more money, that wouldn't bring a smile to my face. Unless I got better drugs or more delicious-looking nurses." ~ William T. Vollmann
6. "Lovers may never meet again, but the ways of enemies oft do intersect: This proves some corollary about gravity." ~ William T. Vollmann
7. "Anyone who would pay to have sex with a woman who has no options deserves to get ripped off." ~ William T. Vollmann
8. "But how could he explain anything to them, when they understood good but not goodness, strong but not strength, black but not blackness? Give us bread! the Savages cried. Heal us!They were frightened by the consecrated wine, believing that the Black-Gowns drank human blood. This is the blood of JESUS, said Pere Masse. Was that a man? they asked.He was the SON OF GOD, but He became a man to die for us. In memory of his sacrifice, we drink His blood. At this they drew back and whispered in their language, with many terrified glances." ~ William T. Vollmann
9. "We always see ourselves as constant, and others as less so, no matter what policy shifts we ourselves may have been guilty of." ~ William T. Vollmann
10. "What is a woman to me? The answer must be: A projection. Who is projecting, and for what reason, I cannot necessarily know from the performance itself. Mr. Umewaka and Mr. Mikata do not when playing their feminine roles feel themselves to be women; they strive, as I so often in my wonderment repeat, to be nothing; yet when they enact women I see them as women. Meanwhile the psyche within a male body which mechanically performs itself as such may see itself as female" ~ William T. Vollmann
11. "The reformed addict who feels the craving almost believes in it, then merely smiles…" ~ William T. Vollmann
12. "I do most sincerely believe that ethical behavior as we best construe it ought to be followed by us throughout our lives, even on the last day of life, and that if we have made a bad or even evil choice we are not barred (or excused) thereby from continuing to live the last moments or years given to us in whatever way we consider to be most right." ~ William T. Vollmann
13. "As surely as the town of Rochelle is Protestant I can see you now becoming impatient. The covers of my book are between your relentless palms. A single hint of insolence on this page, the faintest shine of gloating over all these delays, and you will slam the volume shut - don't claim I can't predict it!" ~ William T. Vollmann
14. "Thus the protagonist of this Dream of mine is ooze, here and forever call'd Oozymandias the King." ~ William T. Vollmann
15. "Death cannot be experienced either by the dead or the living." ~ William T. Vollmann
16. "Perhaps Bug and Tony should have been allies. But any successful structure of domination always gets the weak to reject each other." ~ William T. Vollmann
17. "There was no one as good as he at using the ovens of logic to bake agreeable results." ~ William T. Vollmann
18. "Evil is one thing. Evil's only subjective. Illegal is another." ~ William T. Vollmann
19. "Across the street an addict was mumbling, his words, like Dan Smooth's, reminiscent of the structure of graphite, which is to say comprised of slender hexagonal plates of atoms which slough off at a touch like the multitudinous crusts of a Turkish pastry." ~ William T. Vollmann
20. "I can't say I know much, but I've loved, maybe too much; maybe from love I'll get my death. I've seen Madagascar and walked the frozen sea. I have no trade, make nothing but pretty things which fail against the seriousness of rice. I'm not well or wise; I fear death; but I've never failed any woman I loved... I denied none esteem, never heeded shaming words. I can't say I've done much or been much, but I'm not ashamed of who I've been. I don't ask your forgiveness or remembrance. I'm in the flowers on my grave, unknown and content." ~ William T. Vollmann
21. "Mr. Norris knew this hoard to be worth much less than the tall man believed, but as long he believed it, he'd stay honest. Thus ran Mr. Norris's theory, which was not only philosophical but also empirically scientific in the best sense." ~ William T. Vollmann
22. "Nothing, brother. Everything's about nothing. You know that, but you prefer to pretend otherwise. We both do." ~ William T. Vollmann
23. "What do you get when you cross a nymphomaniac with a kleptomaniac? A rapist, said Tyler." ~ William T. Vollmann
24. "So you cheat on your wife and you want me to give you a gold star for it, said Domino. Well, mister, I pity your wife and I don't give a fuck about you. Now I've got to go outside for a minute and see a man about a dog. When I come back, if you want a flatback or a blow, you just lay down your money in my hand. But no more of your hypocritical bullshit. Who the hell do you think you are? You're just a kid in the candy store that can't decide which kind of liquorice he wants to stuff his face with. Now sit there and shut up." ~ William T. Vollmann
25. "Perhaps the sallow drunk should have taken the hint. But he needed to feel confident in his life. It was only when he drank that he felt he could be anything. He felt this precisely because his perceptions had grown so constricted that he could no longer be cognizant of his limitations, like those old people who when sight, hearing and memory slip away make unflattering remarks in loud voices about others who are still present but out of their dwindling sensory range. How amazed they'd be, if they understood that the nasty man who'd long since vanished from their apprehension like last Thursday's television show had just now heard them denounce his nastiness! For they'd meant no harm! Backstab gossip doesn't harm anybody, does it? It's only steam-letting, social sport, wit, liveliness, self-comfort like complaining over an arthritic wrist." ~ William T. Vollmann
26. "Expressiveness in others enriched Mrs. Singer's confidence in her own interpretations, possibly because a certain fear that she had not accomplished anything in her life left her all the more desirous of discovering easy clues to less consequential questions." ~ William T. Vollmann
27. "At an office party, John heard a woman say: I want to divest. I want somebody to buy us. Then we can relax. Our stock hasn't gone public yet, but soon it will. John thought: You sound like one of the Capp Street girls." ~ William T. Vollmann
28. "(sunglasses make the world quieter and safer, as if you are viewing things behind smoked windows fronting your skull-house: you are inside and the world is outside, and the world cannot see into you; mirror sunglasses double the armor)," ~ William T. Vollmann
29. "Oh, ants, my sisters, good old honeydew-seekers! From close up you are sticky and shiny and gristly; and your nymphs have parasitic red mites stuck to them. You are too intent upon your chewing and gathering to listen to me, but I tell you that despite my warm feelings I really do not like you, and I cannot feel sorry for you in any way because there are too many of you and you are not cute at all. You eat too much of my forests; you are a rebellious tribe, and I will destroy you; I will poison your nests with sweet-smelling traps." ~ William T. Vollmann
30. "For we all must build our worlds around us, bravely or dreamily, as long as we can we shelter ourselves from the rain, walling ourselves in gorgeously." ~ William T. Vollmann
31. "So he lent her books. After all, one of life's best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more pleasurable still is rereading that book; most pleasurable of all is lending it to the person one loves: Now she is reading or has just read the scene with the mirrors; she who is so lovely is drinking in that loveliness I've drunk." ~ William T. Vollmann
32. "I studied Comparative Literature at Cornell. Structuralism was real big then. The idea of reading and writing as being this language game. There's a lot of appeal to that. It's nice to think of it as this playful kind of thing. But I think that another way to look at it is "Look, I just want to be sincere. I want to write something and make you feel something and maybe you will go out and do something." And it seems that the world is in such bad shape now that we don't have time to do nothing but language games. That's how it seems to me." ~ William T. Vollmann
33. "Death is ordinary. Behold it, subtract its patterns and lessons from those of the death that weapons bring, and maybe the residue will show what violence is." ~ William T. Vollmann
34. "Maybe life is a process of trading hopes for memories." ~ William T. Vollmann
35. "Great art projects a sense of inexhaustibility. In literature, particularly in poetry, this may be accomplished through ambiguity: Beneath each and every meaning that I can descry lie others, so that rereading holds out the prospect of new subtleties, inversions, secret codes and ineffabilities" ~ William T. Vollmann
36. "The smoke detectors began to ring; for they were battery-powered and thus still functioned, just as a record can still be played after the death of every member of the orchestra." ~ William T. Vollmann
37. "(Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?)" ~ William T. Vollmann
38. "Her breasts were big and sad like owls' eyes." ~ William T. Vollmann
39. "It was about as easy getting the Statue of Liberty to spread cunny, which did take some dynamite persuasion." ~ William T. Vollmann
40. "In the preface of "The Rifles" "Another rule we followed was never kill an animal that we were not going to use for food or clothing." Barnabas Piryuaq"Well, in those high latitudes we found such quantities of seals and walruses that we simply did not know what to do with them.There were thousands and thousands lying there; we walked among them and hit them on the head, and laughed heartily in the abundance which God had created." Jan Welzi 1933." ~ William T. Vollmann
41. "Looking at her, thinking of her transported him, which struck him as vile because now it was hard for him not to despise the icy serenity of their earlier relations. And he knew that he should not love her, for she had been someone else whom he was supposed to love differently. -What is loneliness? Does the lonely space between two rocks vanish when spanned by a spider web?" ~ William T. Vollmann
42. "But, as I have said, the bugs had no interest in getting us…and no great curiosity or enthusiasm about us as such; from the cowardly cockroaches to the blind stolid ants they wanted only to be left alone to eat and breed and eat and breed, just like us." ~ William T. Vollmann

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Today's Quote

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage."
Author: Albert Camus

What Did William T. Vollmann Talk About?

Thin
Wit
Hen
Per
May
Here
Ear
Ten
Sin
Use
Lie
Ring
Son
She
Less
End
Con
Hey
King
Old
Win
Low
Read
Maybe
Cause
Bee
Since
Others
Off
Body
Mean
Woman
Said
Thus
Owe
Cannot
Tan
Call
Does
Boo
Rank
Line
Wing
Tie
Ours
Given
Hit
Self
Reading
Rain

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