Storm Jameson Quotes - Page 2

to grow old is to have taken away, one by one, all gifts of life, the food and wine, the music and the company. ... the gods unloose, one by one, the mortal fingers that cling to the edge of the table.

Lord, if there is a heartache Vienna cannot cure I hope never to feel it. I came home cured of everything except Vienna.

Could anything be absurder than a man? The animal who knows everything about himself--except why he was born and the meaning of his unique existence.

Speaking the truth, once you have started it, is too exhilarating to draw back.

She did not so much cook as assassinate food.

Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are - gentleness, memory, and habit.

Failures to love are irremediable and irredeemable.

... the truth is exactly that which can't be got into words. We are forced to lie, a little or, if we are inferior, much.

The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.

When you talk of revolution ... you never talk of the day after.

A joke is a joke or the image of a truth.

Pornography is essentially reductive, an exercise in the nothing-but mode, a depersonalizing of the human beings involved, a showing-up of human lust as nothing but an affair of the genitals.

If you think with enough energy about a hoped-for event, it will in the end happen. Not because you willed it. Because it was all the time in your nature.

In what touches their social convictions, most persons do not think. The threat of change, with all it suggests to them in the loss of social and economic privilege, alarms so deeply that they are incapable of unprejudiced thought. They seem to themselves to be thinking, with lucidity and fairness, but since they start from the conviction that change must undoubtedly be for the worse or from settled grief at the thought of losing what is old and lovely, they are doing no more than following a logical sequence of ideas from a false premise.

... we do not remember people as they were. What we remember is the effect they had on us then, but we remember it through an emotion charged with all that has since happened to us.

Think of all the really successful men and women you know. Do you know a single one who didn't learn very young the trick of calling attention to himself in the right quarters?

Critics have been amusing themselves for a long time by auscultating fiction for signs of heart failure.

Language is one of the thin walls humanity has built up over centuries against its own bestial and destructive impulses.

All writers who can claim to be called 'living' must be political in a sense. They must have what the Quakers call a concern to understand what is happening in the world, and must engage themselves, in their writing, to promote no comfortable lies, of the sort which people will pay well to be told rather than the truth.

The critic's hankering to be law-giver rather than servant of literature is irrepressible.

Any marriage worth the name is no better than a series of beginnings - many of them abortive.

A minor symptom of wars is the cancerous growth of committees.

The least stupid question a man asks in his lifetime is not: Is there a God and is He a god or a devil? But: Brother, why are you killing me?

invaders always destroy libraries.

... I used words without precautions. I wanted to disappear into them, I fled into the bovaryism of the writer trying to create an effect.