“It is not death that is to be feared but, rather—and something history should be devoted to demonstrating—the loss of excellence.” — William H. Gass, “There Was an Old Woman Who,” from Tests of Time
“A fiction is forever a fiction, and everything that was will remain as it was eternally.” — William H. Gass, “There Was an Old Woman Who,” from Tests of Time
“No amount of relativism, no degree of deconstruction, no namby-pamby pluralism, despite debunking, the disclosure of bias, the so-called unreliability of observers and their cultural conditioning—their class and color blindness—or the oft-bewailed problems of representation, language’s betrayal of the mind, should be allowed to shake the singleness, consistency, and wholeness of any happening.” — William H. Gass, “There Was an Old Woman Who,” from Tests of Time