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

Tags: poverty



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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


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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

Tags: beauty theater japanese noh vollmann



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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

Tags: masks gender-roles womanhood



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Her breasts were big and sad like owls' eyes.

William T. Vollmann

Tags: just-good-goddamn-writing



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Death cannot be experienced either by the dead or the living.

William T. Vollmann

Tags: death living



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Self-deception is a pessimistic definition of optimism.

William T. Vollmann


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We Communists say, if it has no practically measurable effect, it's not people's art!

William T. Vollmann


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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


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Plato says that as one learns to love, the image of any specific beloved can be left behind for knowledge of the Good.

William T. Vollmann


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