William T. Vollmann QUOTES

21 " Do you want to know what happiness is? Happiness is the absence of unpleasant information. "

― William T. Vollmann , Europe Central

23 " 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 , Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement, and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater

25 " 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 , Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement, and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater

27 " 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 , Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means

29 " This is my final book. Any subsequent productions bearing my name will have been composed by a ghost. "

― William T. Vollmann , Last Stories and Other Stories

31 " 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 , Europe Central

33 " 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 , The Royal Family

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

― William T. Vollmann , Europe Central

37 " 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 , Europe Central

39 " 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 the middlemen with bullets of vanguardist light so everyone could get back to the country, don’t you think? -- As things stood, even had Bug been able to cover the earth again with forests, after having lived so long in the excremental piles of cement and rusted steel he never could have seen trees as more than tedious identical dirty giant toothpicks unfit to be taken into the mouth’ his summer camp, as a dishwasher jail where you breathed in the steam of bad food; and the islands to which he had rowed, as sad unwholesome protuberances, polyps and land-cancers still in the stink of the outhouse -- and all the girls had long since grown up completely to make travesties of their lives, even though some inherited great riches as we used to reckon riches in those days. -- But surely this change in him was necessary, for without wretchedness and degradation of self one will never accomplish anything. "

― William T. Vollmann , You Bright and Risen Angels