|
fdfac1e
|
Maybe life is a process of trading hopes for memories.
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
e20472d
|
Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be reduced to mere falsehood. Well-crafted protagonists come to life, pornography causes orgasms, and the pretense that life is what we want it to be may conceivably bring about the desired condition. Hence religious parables, socialist realism, Nazi propaganda. And if this story likewise crawls with reactionary supernaturalism, that might be because its author longs to see letters scuttling a..
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
3eeeea0
|
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 |
|
f6885d1
|
Death cannot be experienced either by the dead or the living.
|
|
living
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
a9838f8
|
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 |
|
736262e
|
Self-deception is a pessimistic definition of optimism.
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
3a1ef2c
|
This book was written by a traitor to his class. It is dedicated to bigots everywhere. Ladies and gentlemen of the black shirts, I call upon you to unite, to strike with claws and kitchen pokers, to burn the grub-worms of equality's brood with sulfur and oil, to huddle together whispering about the silverfish in your basements, to make decrees in your great solemn rotten assemblies concerning what is proper, for you have nothing to lose but..
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
a8d30c9
|
Standing on your own feet, naturally, is as tiresome and dangerous as standing your ground; and when the wild dogs begin to circle grinning round you with their dripping tongues hanging out and you know that with mock servility they like to go for your toes first, why, then, you should stand on someone else's feet, or head if necessary. It is a point of faith for me never to be Hitler; he stood his ground in his own two shoes in his own lit..
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
4bc7955
|
Do you want to know what happiness is? Happiness is the absence of unpleasant information.
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
81ae5c8
|
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 Wel..
|
|
violence
native-americans
slaughter
environment
hunters
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
139a5fc
|
Who dies best, the soldier who falls for your sake, or the fly in my whiskey-glass? The happy agony of the fly is his reward for an adventurous dive in no cause but his own. Gorged and crazed, he touches bottom, knows he's gone as far as he can go, and bravely sticks. I sleep on. In the morning I pour new happiness upon the crust of the old, and only as I raise the glass to my lips descry through that rich brown double inch my flattened her..
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
a256a22
|
We all lived for money, and that is what we died for.
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
240a632
|
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
|
|
noh
vollmann
japanese
theater
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
5f539bd
|
Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?)
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
2465e79
|
This is the heart of it, the scared woman who does not want to go alone to the man any longer, because when she does, when she takes of her baggy dress, displaying to him rancid breasts each almost as big as his own head, or no breasts, or mammectomized scar tissues taped over with old tennis balls to give her the right curves; when, vending her flesh, she stands or squats waiting, congealing the air firstly with her greasy cheesey stench o..
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
20d0929
|
Such mental haziness is in order, given the delightful vagueness of the terrain.
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
39947a7
|
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 suc..
|
|
womanhood
masks
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
cfcb646
|
The reformed addict who feels the craving almost believes in it, then merely smiles...
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
e9857a5
|
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 |
|
8dd97d6
|
Anyone who would pay to have sex with a woman who has no options deserves to get ripped off.
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
dc0d221
|
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 dri..
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
d10c79e
|
But where corpses were buried secretly, there the grass grows thick; such signs (and there are ever so many others!) may be read by those to whom truth is more important than beauty.
|
|
death
truth
signs
secrets
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
f7314b6
|
So then, in a pleading tone, he whispers: Why did you make me? I never wanted to be made... For propaganda, of course. It's all in your own book. How can we persuade others to be good, without evil we can point to?
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
906df66
|
He was really quite addicted to her face, and yet for the longest time he could not remember it at all, it being so much brighter than sunlight on a pool of water that he could only recall that blinding brightness; then after awhile, since she refused to give him her photograph, he began to practice looking away for a moment when he was still with her, striving to uphold in his inner vision what he had just seen (her pale, serious, smooth a..
|
|
photography
memory
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
4c347a9
|
This is my final book. Any subsequent productions bearing my name will have been composed by a ghost.
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
f511c76
|
When it comes to revolutionaries, trust only the sad ones. The enthusiastic ones are the oppressors of tomorrow.
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
622b7ca
|
All that's happened is inconsequential; it cannot hurt us anymore; there's only music, which lives within us and beyond us, needing us to express it but capable of surviving forever between expressions.
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
c3c5ff7
|
The hospital bulked darkly in the darkness.
|
|
writing
darkness
form
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
8f96260
|
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 |
|
488a425
|
When they'd been children there'd been a fallen log in the river, and John had walked on it, keeping his balance, instructing his brother: If you don't think about it, you won't fall.--That would be a perfect epitaph, thought Tyler malevolently, crushing the space invader raindrops with his windshield wipers.
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
dd012a5
|
It is the occupation of politicians to deny this ubiquity, nay, universality of corroded hearts, to discount the barren laboriousness of all paths. Reduce corporate taxes, they say, or redistribute the wealth of the parasitic class to the desperate class, and then all who matter can cross the Jordan together and enter into a new land of happiness whose prior inhabitants will dissolve into sea-colored ghosts of dust.
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
6881014
|
We Communists say, if it has no practically measurable effect, it's not people's art!
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
1fec0c8
|
I've come to recognize that questions of law and justice are at the same time questions of power.
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
7c4db42
|
Best listened to in a windowless room, better than best in an airless room--correctly speaking, a bunker sealed forever and enwrapped in tree-roots--the Eighth String Quartet of Shostakovich (Opus 110) is the living corpse of music, perfect in its horror. Call it the simultaneous asphyxiation and bleeding of melody. The soul strips itself of life in a dusty room.
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
ce5f11c
|
A treble clef, for example, resembles a Muscovite or Leningrader in a bulky hooded parka. A bass clef bends as simply and painfully as a silhouetted widow in Leningrad drawing water from the whiteness of a frozen canal.
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
1e2008a
|
As he breathed the black and grey air into his body he no longer thought of anything as lovely, the way the retiring trees of his boyhood had been; for everything was made up of dirt-clods; and you do construct a mountain from molehills or other over-codified facts. If only the cities had been dynamited before it was too late for him! -- That Pol Pot sure had the right idea, blowing down those ticky-tacky rice paper offices and illuminating..
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
663190f
|
There was the biography of a Norwegian resistance fighter who swam through chilly oceans and got gangrene and wandered through I think it might have been Finland or Lapland in a sweet short summer and everyone took him in and the dark Finnish women made him tea with honey in it on late afternoons and it was beautiful but also horribly sad because the book was only half over and you knew that bad things were going to happen.
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
fa8a75f
|
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.
|
|
perspective
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
c823247
|
Her breasts were big and sad like owls' eyes.
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
2dc17ee
|
There was no one as good as he at using the ovens of logic to bake agreeable results.
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
1462a23
|
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 |
|
f977cfc
|
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 |
|
ea636bb
|
Thus the protagonist of this Dream of mine is ooze, here and forever call'd
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |
|
96745ac
|
Women are sewers just like we are, the once pure boys recognize with a start; it's raw sewage that produces fertilization; once you understand that you can be fond of yourself and members of the Opposite Sex, but you can never quite see them again as ice cream bars. I, the author, don't really mind this, for I love all girls and love to hug and kiss them and cheer them up when they cry, and have them perform all the same services for me; an..
|
|
|
William T. Vollmann |