William H. Gass Quotes: Notable Quotations and Sayings by William H. Gass

It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of William H. Gass, a renowned postmodernist novelist who emphasized form and language over literary norms like plot and character. He was 93 years old.

His wife, Mary Henderson Gass, confirmed that he died of congestive heart failure. Professor Emeritus of the Washington University in St. Louis for more than 30 years before his death.

He is credited with coining the phrase “metafiction,” which refers to works in which the creator is also a character in the narrative. He was a master of the art form himself.

Early Life

William Gass, a well-known American novelist, was born on this date in 1924. The Tunnel and Omensetter’s Luck are two of the best-known works by this American novelist, short story writer, and critic.

For his literary criticism, he was awarded the Truman Capote Award. The zodiac sign of William Gass, according to Astrologers, is Leo.

Fargo, North Dakota, is where he was born. In 1952, he wed Mary Pat O’Kelly.

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Great city, St. Louis

Originally from Fargo, North Dakota, Mr. Gass grew up in Warren, Ohio, the son of a failed architect and his mother’s alcoholic husband. They’d show up in “The Tunnel,” admittedly, but the author fiercely denied that his work was inspired by many events in his own life. He highlighted that writers of fiction “create stuff up.”

Mr. Gass, a World War II Navy veteran, penned a memoir for the Washington University Archives on his time in the service. He was a crew member of Pasadena, the “capital ship” of its fleet.

As a result, we had an admiral and his entourage of toadies along for the ride. We lacked experience because we hadn’t been there before. In the same way that I am a novice at everything, our boat was spanking new (like me).”

Mr. Gass graduated from Kenyon College with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1947. In 1954, Cornell University awarded him his Ph.D. The title of his dissertation, “A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor,” appears to be a harbinger of what he will do later.

At Wooster College, Mr. Gass taught for four years, before moving to Purdue University where he taught for 14 years.

William H. Gass Quotes:

• “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 the sturdier stock.”
  — William H. Gass

  #Character #Writing #Stories

• “The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.”
  — William H. Gass

  #Writing #Expression #Movement

• “Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal”
  — William H. Gass

  #Becoming #Fiction #Visuals

• “It’s, not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made the word”
  — William H. Gass

  #Writing #Fiction #Flesh

• “I don’t know myself, what to do, where to go… I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort… it’s what the world offers… please leave me alone to dream as I fancy.”
  — William H. Gass

  #Dream #Lying #Book

• “I should like to suggest that at least on the face of it a stroke by stroke story of a copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken’s wing.”
  — William H. Gass

  #Wings #Stories #Faces

• “But the body fails us and the mirror knows, and we no longer insist that the gray hush be carried off its surface by the cloth, for we have run to fat, and wrinkles encircle the eyes and notch the neck where the skin wattles and the flesh of the arms hangs loose like an overlarge sleeve, veins thicken like ropes and empurple the body as though they had been drawn there by a pen, freckles darken, liver spots appear, the hair, the hair is exhausted and gray and lusterless, in weary rolls like cornered lint.”
  — William H. Gass

  #Running #Eye #Mirrors

• “My face is muffled in my mother’s clothing. Her rhinestones injure me. See: my feet are going. Fish flee the forefinger of my aunt. The sun streams over the geraniums. What has this to do with what I feel, with what I am.”
  — William H. Gass

  #Mother #Aunt #Feet

• “The alcoholic trance is not just a haze, as though the eyes were also unshaven. It is not a mere buzzing in the ears, a dizzinessor disturbance of balance. One arrives in the garden again, at nursery time, when the gentle animals are fed and in all the world there are only toys.”