Paul Fussell Quotes - Page 2

The balls used in top class games are generally smaller than those used in others.

There is no Apocalypse.

To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.

The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be.

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.

The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and conscience.

Irony is the attendant of hope and the fuel of hope is innocence.

And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach.

The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.

Most people who seek attention and regard by announcing that they're writing a novel are actually so devoid of narrative talent that they can't hold the attention of a dinner table for thirty seconds, even with a dirty joke.

Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way.

Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.

Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience.

If the guidebook used to be critical, today it seems largely a celebratory adjunct to the publicity operations of hotels, resorts, and even countries.

Things without defense: insects, kittens, small boys.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.

If the term discussion has always seemed to me to imply mild warnings of wasted time, workshop sets off a clangorous alarm.

A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, but more selectively. A travel book, in its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply.

So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past.So many dreams lost in the madness that had engulfed us.Except for a few widely scattered shouts of joy,the survivors of the abyss sat hollow-eyed and silent, trying to comprehend a world without war.

If truth is the main casualty in war, ambiguity is another.

All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel