William t. vollmann Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Author: William T. Vollmann
Quotes of Author: William T. Vollmann

William T. Vollmann _ WHORES FOR GLORIA
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.
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William T. Vollmann _ Europe Central
those T-34s? Better not to look! I see you shining, my beloved, chaotic, all-knowing, heartless Russia. Stalin's daughter Svetlana wrote that.
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William T. Vollmann _ Europe Central
All this is the flimsiest speculation, which is God's gift to historical fictioneers.
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William T. Vollmann _ Europe Central
The things you love too much perish"-After Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 78. The composer goes on: "You have to treat everything with irony, especially the things you hold dear.
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William T. Vollmann _ You Bright and Risen Angels
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.
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William T. Vollmann _ Whores for Gloria
Jimmy decided to get drunk-not just drunk enough to enjoy life {here he grinned, and Cecily smiled back}, not just drunk enough to fuck Cecily for instance up the ass without a rubber, not just drunk enough to hear bees buzzing round his ears and wake up in another bad place he'd never seen before with crushed bugs on the walls and men maybe standing over him looking down at him with their teeth drawn away from their lips, and puke cold and sticky all over his face again, puke being the concretization of Jimmy's disgust with Jimmy whose eyes would be burning and throat burning and stomach squirming like a guilty squid and every muscle aching, and the dry heaves inside him just like heartbeats, just like yesterday;-no, he wanted to be drunk enough to scientifically establish the existence of the whores that he could see all around him. {Jimmy had always liked whores.} So he started drinking.
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William T. Vollmann _ You Bright and Risen Angels
...As a child he had gone out for Halloween as a mummy, a vampire, a blue-and-green-swolen drowned boy, all kinds of sufferings and mutilations and perversions represented by his costumes; and looking around him he saw witches and Frankenstein monsters and scarred warty masks of all the kids running around asking for candy in the dark; and he wondered: Why must we hurt ourselves and drive stakes through our hearts and drown ourselves in order to get candy? Why couldn't we just go out and ask for it?
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William T. Vollmann _ No Good Alternative: Volume
A less negative carbon ideologue then I might interpret the lonely wariness of Mr. Winkler and of Sharon Carlisle as proof of wrongheaded irrelevance. Socrates was equally irrelevant once the Athenians had served him his hemlock. The insipidities of the hollowed out Greeley Tribune, the no comment of most people to whom I "reached out," and the typical anomie of an American metropolis, whose citizens I rarely saw except in their cars, in retail establishments or at the Fourth of July parade, operated synergistically to create the usual hot wide silence-about fracking, climate change, democracy and every other thing. A certain form of economic development held sway, and that was that.
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William T. Vollmann _ No Good Alternative: Volume
{I}f I can be sure of any aspect of your character, it is that you are not as I. Since all I can do here is imagine you in my image, of course I have failed. I was as fossil fuels made me. They kept my lights on. Hence I who imagine myself to be open-minded will appear to you as deservedly dead, fossilized in the stratum of my own period's prejudices.
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William T. Vollmann _ The Ice-Shirt
The landscape around us is but a shadow of the landscape within us.
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William T. Vollmann _ Europe Central
...each bullet not a moment but a moment's end...
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William T. Vollmann _ Europe Central
Bones, murdered or merely perished, ought to stay silent. That's the law. But, quick and shrill as a violin-screech, they come back, to the terror of all who stand guilty of living, and then they dance, playing on their tomb-lids as lightly as cats--but the game's evil, hateful, angry; there's no fun in being a skeleton!
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