William T. Vollmann Quotes

At the time that he had seriously begun to consolidate his organization, Parker was working in a custom photo lab. The reader who is not much taken by audiovisual pastimes may have a deficient picture of that place where Parker was employed; or perhaps not so much a deficient picture — the dyes faded, shoddily spotted, brutishly burned in and doltishly dodged by subhuman technicians under the glare of the enlargers — as an image which had been misfiled in the archives of the memory, representing instead one of those bleak Photo Drive-Ups and Presto Printses located nowadays on the corner of almost every large parking lot, in which the clerks wait sadly behind their glass counters, but no one comes in, and the air becomes darker and darker over the course of the morning as a result of exhaust fumes (there goes another brain cell; ping! - THAT thought will never be completed now); and the pink chubby tots smiling at your from the walls in sample enlargements become steadily more grimy, and by the lunch break they are brown; and the day ticks off on the loud digital clock; and then finally a car creeps into the lot, and a popeyed couple locks that vehicle doors listlessly; they request a reprint of a washed-out snapshot of their son who was killed in the Indian Wars, and they go away; and after a long time here comes a slick-haired teenager who once took a few pix of his girlfriend holding a balloon at the zoo in front of the monkey cage on a dirty overcast day, and the clerk can tell just by looking at this customer that they won’t come out, because the guy’s a loser if the clerk knows anything at all about losers and in fact he knows a hell of a lot about losers because why else would he be stuck with this job?

What unlikely things we are, of course, with our voluntary locomotions, and our body heat which keeps our fat from congealing until death! — and how natural the inevitable downward course! (For it seems a wonder that our fleshly contraptions can endure an hour). — How natural, then, the Zombie.
[“The Blue Yonder”]

"In the preface of "The Rifles"
"Another rule we followed was never kill an animal that we were not going to use for food or clothing." Barnabas Piryuaq
"Well, in those high latitudes we found such quantities of seals and walruses that we simply did not know what to do with them.There were thousands and thousands lying there; we walked among them and hit them on the head, and laughed heartily in the abundance which God had created." Jan Welzi 1933. "

Life had been as inviting as tracks leading everywhere, shining within the frame of the boxcar’s darkness I lived in. Yes, I live in a frame! How can I enter the picture itself? But as soon as I do, or not long after, it loses its magic, which is why I want to travel again. Was the magic ever there? Was I or “reality” to blame for its destruction?

How free am I? Don’t I skulk like a rat through trainyards? Don’t I doze in boxcars with my boots on and without a sleeping bag, so that I can disappear more quickly when emergency strikes? Don’t I long for my train to move? How I love shadow-shows! Particularly beguiling is the way that freeway overpasses fill a rushing boxcar’s doorway with silhouetted diagonals. Do I love shadows because I fear the third dimension? Am I a writer and a printmaker in an effort to control my perception of the world by constricting it to my level? And aren’t all these questions, which rush through my mind and depart unanswered, nothing but shadow-shows themselves?

But, as I have said, the bugs had no interest in getting us…and no great curiosity or enthusiasm about us as such; from the cowardly cockroaches to the blind stolid ants they wanted only to be left alone to eat and breed and eat and breed, just like us.

So many revolutionaries are intellectuals, a class of people whose aspirations tend to run ahead of their capabilities.

Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be reduced to mere falsehood. Well-crafted protagonists come to life, pornography causes orgasms, and the pretense that life is what we want it to be may conceivably bring about the desired condition. Hence religious parables, socialist realism, Nazi propaganda. And if this story likewise crawls with reactionary supernaturalism, that might be because its author longs to see letters scuttling across ceilings, cautiously beginning to reify themselves into angels. For if they could only do that, then why not us?

Anyone who would pay to have sex with a woman who has no options deserves to get ripped off.

But where corpses were buried secretly, there the grass grows thick; such signs (and there are ever so many others!) may be read by those to whom truth is more important than beauty.

What do you get when you cross a nymphomaniac with a kleptomaniac?
A rapist, said Tyler.

The reformed addict who feels the craving almost believes in it, then merely smiles…

Nothing, brother. Everything's about nothing. You know that, but you prefer to pretend otherwise. We both do.

There was the biography of a Norwegian resistance fighter who swam through chilly oceans and got gangrene and wandered through I think it might have been Finland or Lapland in a sweet short summer and everyone took him in and the dark Finnish women made him tea with honey in it on late afternoons and it was beautiful but also horribly sad because the book was only half over and you knew that bad things were going to happen.

(Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?)