Only the slow reader will notice the odd crowd of images-flier, butcher, seal-which have gathered to comment on the aims and activities of the speeding reader, perhaps like gossips at a wedding.
William H Gass
We have scarcely gotten home.. When our children's sneezes greet us, skinned knees bleed after waiting all day to do so. There is the bellyache and the burned-out basement bulb, the stalled car and the incontinent cat. The windows frost, the toilets sweat, the body of our spouse is one cold shoulder and the darkness of our bedroom is soon full of the fallen shadows of our failures.
car home body shadows darkness day waiting cat cold fallen spouse windows sweat
reading wedding odd crowd reader
The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.
thought expression words write
If you believed yourself to be a writer of eminence, you are now assured of being over the hill-not a sturdy mountain flower but a little wilted lily of the valley.
writer flower mountain
The death of God represents not only the realization that gods have never existed, but the contention that such a belief is no longer even irrationally possible: that neither reason nor the taste and temper of the times condones it. The belief lingers on, of course, but it does so like astrology or a faith in a flat earth.
belief temper contention faith death earth reason gods times realization taste astrology god
Books didn't figure in my family very much.... However, my grandmother's attic was full of old, old books... In the summers we would go to North Dakota to visit her, and I would get in that attic and read everything in sight. That's when the passion started. I was maybe eight or nine.
family passion read sight books
[For the speedy reader] paragraphs become a country the eye flies over looking for landmarks, reference points, airports, restrooms, passages of sex.
sex eye country airports
The speeding reader guts a book the way the skillful clean fish. The gills are gone, the tail, the scales, the fins; then the fillet slides away swifly as though fed to a seal.
clean book guts fish reader
And the darkness of our bedroom is soon full of the fallen shadows of our failures.
shadows darkness fallen
Getting even is one reason for writing.
writing reason
The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.
writing alchemy change true world gold words
Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house
poetry poets madness
For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.
symbols poetry writing short-story short-stories
I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
writing
Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal
writing fiction
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