Of course there is enough to stir our wonder anywhere; there's enough to love, anywhere, if one is strong enough, if one is diligent enough, if one is perceptive, patient, kind enough -- whatever it takes.
William H. GassRead
The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Writing can distort our thoughts as the act of writing shifts our understanding.
This quote by William H. Gass reflects on the inherent challenges of translating complex thoughts into written words. It suggests that the act of writing itself can alter the original intention or clarity of the idea, as the physical actions of the fingers can misrepresent what was initially conceived in the mind.
Themes
WritingThoughtExpressionCommunicationPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used during a writing workshop to illustrate the complexities of expressing thoughts on paper.
More from William H. Gass
All quotes →For the speedy reader paragraphs become a country the eye flies over looking for landmarks, reference points, airports, restrooms, passages of sex.
William H. GassRead
For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.
William H. GassRead
So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there’s one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is love that brings it own birth with it, just as Plato has declared, and that you should therefore give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them
William H. GassRead
Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house
William H. GassRead
I am firmly of the opinion that people who can’t speak have nothing to say. It’s one more thing we do to the poor, the deprived: cut out their tongues … allow them a language as lousy as their life
William H. GassRead
Similar quotes
The policy or advantage of [immigration] taking place in a body (I mean the settling of them in a body) may be much questioned; for, by so doing, they retain the language, habits, and principles (good or bad) which they bring with them. Whereas by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, and laws: in a word, soon become one people.
George WashingtonRead
When the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only in appearance. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise, which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.
D. H. LawrenceRead
Fortunately analysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.
Karen HorneyRead
As is known, it is in the realm of experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we may grasp along what imaginary lines the human organism, in the most intimate recesses of its being, manifests its capture in a symbolic dimension.
Jacques LacanRead
Delusion means mortality. And awareness means Buddhahood.
BodhidharmaRead
Wouldn't it be better to have a watertight law designed to catch the guilty, rather than a press release law designed to catch the headlines?
William HagueRead