Al Alvarez Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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I decided I ought to pick a project that would not be controversial, that would not really cost the government a lot of money.
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In combat sports, personalities are what draw.
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I never thought 'Stairway to Heaven' was a long song. I loved how there was this part and then there was another part that was completely different.
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Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.
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Wars begin in the minds of men, and in those minds, love and compassion would have built the defenses of peace.
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We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
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Thanks to my father, we were always in good horses.
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I'm a plodder, one foot in front of the other. Life is all about understanding that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. And it's your ability with how you deal with that adversity that ultimately affects your success.
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Fallible characters are more interesting than superheroes in the end.
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We can't go all over the world killing people because we disagree with them.
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Many women long for what eludes them, and like not what is offered them.
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As far as expectations go, you can never work for expectations. You have to work against them.
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I remember my dreams when I was a junior soloist. 'Oh, I hope I don't end here,' I thought. 'I want to do the ballerina in 'Scotch Symphony.' I don't want to be the little Scotch girl.' And I actually went beyond my wildest dreams. I worked with Balanchine. I had ballets choreographed for me.
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What I care about is readers because without readers I can't make a living... And I think it's a bad thing for the world if people don't read anymore. I want people to read a lot.
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Every industry has slack times, and everyone has bad days at work.
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Life is so short. I would rather sing one song than interpret the thousand.
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Basically, books were a luxury item before the printing press.
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The way that I sing is very mumbled-together, and so I guess I'm kind of stuck with it now.
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Biochemistry is the science of life. All our life processes - walking, talking, moving, feeding - are essentially chemical reactions. So biochemistry is actually the chemistry of life, and it's supremely interesting.
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Stealing is stealing. I don't care if it's on the Internet or you're breaking into a warehouse somewhere - it's theft.
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Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
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I was privileged in terms of where I grew up, and I come from a very loving, supportive household. But when I began to go off the rails at boarding school, my behaviour wasn't a result of an upbringing but more something that was going on within me.
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There's a tremendously satisfying freedom associated with weightlessness. It's challenging in the absence of traction or leverage, and it requires thoughtful readjustment. I found the experience of weightlessness to be one of the most fun and enjoyable, challenging and rewarding, experiences of spaceflight. Returning to Earth brings with it a great sense of heaviness, and a need for careful movement. In some ways it's not too different from returning from a rocking ocean ship.
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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.
