George Gissing Quotes - Page 2

To be at other people's orders brings out all the bad in me.

It is because nations tend towards stupidity and baseness that mankind moves so slowly; it is because individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all.

For one thing, I know every book of mine by its scent.

Persistent prophecy is a familiar way of assuring the event.

A pipe for the hour of work; a cigarette for the hour of conception; a cigar for the hour of vacuity.

Money is time. With money I buy for cheerful use the hours which otherwise would not in any sense be mine; nay, which would make me their miserable bondsman.

How I envy those clerks who go by to their offices in the morning! There's the day's work cut out for them; no question of mood and feeling; they have just to work at something, and when the evening comes, they have earned their wages, and they are free to rest and enjoy themselves. What an insane thing it is to make literature one's only means of support! When the most trivial accident may at any time prove fatal to one's power of work for weeks or months. No, that is the unpardonable sin! To make a trade of an art! I am rightly served for attempting such a brutal folly.

Money is made at Christmas out of holly and mistletoe, but who save the vendors would greatly care if no green branch were procurable? One symbol, indeed, has obscured all others-the minted round of metal. And one may safely say that, of all the ages since a coin first became the symbol of power, ours is that in which it yields to the majority of its possessors the poorest return in heart's contentment.

This writer, who is horribly perspicacious and vigorous, demonstrates the certainty of a great European war, and regards it with the peculiar satisfaction excited by such things in a certain order of mind. His phrases about "dire calamity" and so on mean nothing; the whole tenor of his writing proves that he represents, and consciously, one of the forces which go to bring war about; his part in the business is a fluent irresponsibility, which casts scorn on all who reluct at the "inevitable." Persistent prophecy is a familiar way of assuring the event.

Perhaps it is while drinking tea that I most of all enjoy the sense of leisure.

No, no; women, old or young, should never have to think about money.

People have got that ancient prejudice so firmly rooted in their heads that one mustn't write save at I the dictation of the Holy Spirit. I tell you, writing is a business.

London is a huge shop, with a hotel on the upper storeys.

I am much better employed from every point of view, when I live solely for my own satisfaction, than when I begin to worry about the world. The world frightens me, and a frightened man is no good for anything.

Money is made at Christmas out of holly and mistletoe, but who save the vendors would greatly care if no green branch were procurable?