Home > Author > William T. Vollmann
81 " After all, one of life’s best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more pleasurable still is rereading that book; most pleasurable of all is lending it to the person one loves: Now "
― William T. Vollmann , Europe Central
82 " I know it’s ridiculous, but I sometimes feel that my love for her is the only thing that’s genuine about me. "
83 " The shortest man, codenamed RIMSKY, said to me that freedom means understanding our place within the laws of history; we are more free when we acknowledge our submission to the law of gravity than when we foolishly deny it. "
84 " 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? "
85 " (sunglasses make the world quieter and safer, as if you are viewing things behind smoked windows fronting your skull-house: you are inside and the world is outside, and the world cannot see into you; mirror sunglasses double the armor), "
― William T. Vollmann , Whores for Gloria
86 " A pianist can sometimes resemble a slow underwater swimmer, and a lover likewise swims within the sea of the other, far down where no waves can reach; overhead, the piano’s lid, heavier than a coffin’s, shuts out extraneous vibrations, while simultaneously demarcating the boundary between water and air. It’s too perfect underwater; that’s what kills us, the perfection! "
87 " I’ve come to recognize that questions of law and justice are at the same time questions of power. "
88 " The awareness in an animal’s eyes is alien beyond knowledge, whereas the gaze from within the dark-glass haunted him because he nearly comprehended it. "
― William T. Vollmann , Last Stories and Other Stories
89 " Everywhere that Torah is studied at night one thread-thin ray appears from that hidden light and flows down upon those absorbed in her. —Kabbalah (13th century) "
90 " It’s now widely agreed in progressive social circles that all humankind constitutes a single superorganism. "
91 " On the radio, Klavdia Sulzhenko sang “The Blue Kerchief.” The war had died; that song was getting old; then again, so was I. But "
92 " but the little operative codenamed GREINER, whom I was frankly beginning to consider defeatist, insisted that the Soviets had antidotes to everything, even unfortunate facts. I "
93 " I’m sure you’ve noticed, continued Comrade Luria, how much aestheticians like to prate about the impotence of form without content, or content without form. But in music, perfect form and content together can remain as stillborn as a law without the seal of Heaven on it. There has to be emotion . . . "
94 " as a certain classical slaveholder once wrote, nothing is more painful than days of joy recollected in days of misery. So "
95 " But illusions don’t die all at once— "
96 " By your command, sir, I said. But Elena was still the one I loved. Knowing that I loved her, I knew who I was. "
97 " the skin of her naked throat was as perfect as a political idea. She "
98 " Excuse me, my sweetest little Tatianochka, sometimes I forget how time ticks! Well, "
99 " There had been laid down in that place, I was told, the remains of about six million persons—our conventional total for the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust. The crime which the Nazis accomplished with Immense effort in half-a-dozen years, nature had done here without effort or recourse, and was doing. "
― William T. Vollmann , Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means
100 " Then everything in Germany became black, white and red—the colors of the Third Reich.12 She thought of something that Professor Moholy-Nagy used to say: I don’t care to participate in this sort of optical event. "