Storm Jameson
Hope is a talent like any other.Collection: Hope
For what I have received may the Lord make me truly thankful. And more truly for what I have not received.Collection: Thanksgiving
Language is memory and metaphor.Collection: Communication
Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.
The only way to live is to accept each minute as an unrepeatable miracle, which is exactly what it is: a miracle and unrepeatable.
The impossible talked of is less impossible from the moment words are laid to it.
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?
Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present. Most of us spend fifty-nine minutes an hour living in the past, with regret for lost joys or shame for things badly done (both utterly useless and weakening) or in a future which we either long for or dread. . . . There is only one minute in which you are alive, this minute, here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle. Which is exactly what it is-a miracle and unrepeatable.Collection: Regret
There is only one world; the world pressing against you at this minute. There is only one minute in which you are alive; this minute here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.Collection: Spiritual
Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present.Collection: Live In The Present
The strangest thing about life is not its frightful cruelty, but that it can be gentle.Collection: Life Is
I am never happier than when I am alone in a foreign city; it is as if I had become invisible.Collection: Cities
Surprise will be my last emotion, not fear.Collection: Lasts
There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification.Collection: Vanity
Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow.Collection: Sorrow
Nationalism will keep its venom until we succeed in creating an image of the nations of the whole world as so many provinces.Collection: Creating
War, for any cause, is inexcusable. There is nothing which excuses us for the beastly ingenuity of our wars. Only fools, only the diseased, think that we are served by killing the strong young men with machines.Collection: Strong
There is a stage in any misery when the victim begins to find a deep satisfaction in it.Collection: Satisfaction
What I do not know and cannot even hope to understand before I die is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other ... What nerve has atrophied in the torturer, or worse is sensually moved?Collection: Nerves
You can't argue with a raging want. You can, but it is useless.Collection: Desire
The young are so much more vulnerable than the old - the stuff is still warm and malleable, it takes impressions.Collection: Stuff
Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Animal
In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma.Collection: France
Speaking the truth, once you have started it, is too exhilarating to draw back.Collection: Speak The Truth
Lord, if there is a heartache Vienna cannot cure I hope never to feel it. I came home cured of everything except Vienna.Collection: Home
jealousy, the most hideous emotion any human being ever suffers, has nothing to do with the mind. Or not at first.Collection: Jealousy
each time that I have run away - and from a habit it quickly became an illness - I have betrayed someone. Myself, but not always only myself.Collection: Running
An intelligent man or woman willing to make a career of reviewing fiction is hard to come by ... And the temporaries do the work cheaply. Moreover, continuity may be got at the expense of intellectual arthritis; a reviewer who has been at his grisly task for half a lifetime may stiffen into prejudices of every sort, and become too anchylosed to do better than turn his back to a new wave when it rushes down on him.Collection: Intelligent
To reject censorship after studying the risks involved is very well. To reject it ex cathedra, in the tones of Calvin pronouncing a dogma, eyes and mind closed to the possible consequences, the even marginally possible, is to make things too comfortable for oneself.Collection: Eye
Is it really beyond our wits to devise some form of censorship which would trap only the crudely sadistic?Collection: Censorship
Fear is the deep motive of abstract art - fear of a repellent civilization which is dominated by the power of things. ... who can be surprised if, more sensitive than the others, the artist is terrified by the power things have acquired over us?Collection: Art
If the novel is dying, I see no chance that dismembering it will revive it.Collection: Dying
Novelists who treat violence and cruelty as something to be exploited for their effect, or to enjoy the pleasure of an evacuation, are carriers of a singularly unpleasant disease.Collection: Disease
Mere human beings cant afford to be fanatical about anything. Not even about justice or loyalty. The fanatic for justice ends by murdering a million helpless people to clear a space for his law-courts. If we are to survive on this planet, there must be compromises.Collection: Loyalty
... the whole of society in Washington is to some degree political. It is like no other capital city known to me, in that political thinking, the whole business, technical and personal, of politics, is not diluted by an equal interest in art, industry, amusement, anything you like. I don't meant that these are non-existent in Washington -- only that they are subdued to the ruling passion.Collection: Art
As often as not our whole self...engages itself in the most trivial of things, the shape of a particular hill, a road in the town in which we lived as children, the movement of wind in grass. The things we shall take with us when we die will nearly all be small things.Collection: Life
The hunger of the spirit for eternity - as fierce as a starving man's for bread - is much less a craving to go on living than a craving for redemption. Oh, and a protest against absurdity.Collection: Men
If we are to survive on this planet, there must be compromises.Collection: Compromise
In Europe, war is a disease which has been in the family for generations: no one is surprised when it makes another leap. Even the patient only attends to it with part of his mind.Collection: War
The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.Collection: Past
She did not so much cook as assassinate food.Collection: Cooking
No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker.Collection: Art
Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are - gentleness, memory, and habit.Collection: Memories
A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Taken
... 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.Collection: Lying
When you talk of revolution ... you never talk of the day after.Collection: Revolution
A joke is a joke or the image of a truth.Collection: Jokes
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.Collection: Exercise