Al Alvarez Quotes

• To put yourself into a situation where a mistake cannot necessarily be recouped, where the life you lose may be your own, clears the head wonderfully. It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life. Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.

  Al Alvarez

  Mistake, Climbing, Routine Life

  "Our enduring desire to court deadly risk" by Peter Beaumont, www.theguardian.com. July 14, 2012.

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• No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.

  Al Alvarez

  Men

  Al Alvarez (2013). “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide”, p.116, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights. He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul - his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.

  Al Alvarez

  Self, Media, Psychics

  Al Alvarez (2013). “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide”, p.274, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.

  Al Alvarez

  Men, Water, Despair

  Al Alvarez (2013). “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide”, p.118, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.

  Al Alvarez

  Nervous, Poet, British

  Al Alvarez (2013). “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide”, p.40, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.

  Al Alvarez

  Art, Artist, Vulnerable

  Al Alvarez (2013). “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide”, p.259, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist; since what happened in them was beyond the imagination, it was therefore also beyond art and all those human values on which art is traditionally based.

  Al Alvarez

  Art, Imagination, Police

  Al Alvarez (2013). “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide”, p.271, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Divorce transforms habit into drama.

  Al Alvarez

  Drama, Divorce, Habit

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• It is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it's funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.

  Al Alvarez

  Insulting, Insult, Easy

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• The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.

  Al Alvarez

  Art, Real, Resistance

  Al Alvarez (2013). “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide”, p.283, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself. You pause and attend: the heart beats in your chest; outside, the trees are thick with new leaves, a swallow dips over them, the light moves, people are going about their business.

  Al Alvarez

  Suicide, Moving, Heart

  Al Alvarez (2013). “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide”, p.152, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• I absolutely don't believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.

  Al Alvarez

  Believe, Luck, Don't Believe

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• I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don't get any patients.

  Al Alvarez

  Mean, Patient

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• When you make a bet, you're saying something.

  Al Alvarez

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• Hold'em is a game of calculated aggression. If your cards are good enough for you to call a bet, they are good enough to raise with.

  Al Alvarez

  Gambling, Games, Cards

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• Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it's a kind of risky trade.

  Al Alvarez

  Writing, Thinking, Kind

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• Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation, seemed merely a temporary halt on my steady descent through layer after layer of depression, like an elevator stopping for a moment on the way down to the basement.

  Al Alvarez

  Depression, Disappointment, Relaxation

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• The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.

  Al Alvarez

  Gambling, Games, Looks

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• Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

  Al Alvarez

  Art, Coherence, May

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• I'm good at reading people.

  Al Alvarez

  Reading, People

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