Storm Jameson Quotes

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

The only way to live is to accept each minute as an unrepeatable miracle, which is exactly what it is: a miracle and unrepeatable.

Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.

Surprise will be my last emotion, not fear.

Sadistic literature is not only inhumane. It is anti-human.

For what I have received may the Lord make me truly thankful. And more truly for what I have not received.

Hope is a talent like any other.

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present.

She did not so much cook as assassinate food.

You can't argue with a raging want. You can, but it is useless.

Nationalism will keep its venom until we succeed in creating an image of the nations of the whole world as so many provinces.

There is only one world the world pressing against you this minute.

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

Women will always put persons above ideas ... and so they'll always be defeated. Persons die, and ideas rule the world.

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

The impossible talked of is less impossible from the moment words are laid to it.

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

The young are so much more vulnerable than the old - the stuff is still warm and malleable, it takes impressions.

Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow.

... 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.

There is a stage in any misery when the victim begins to find a deep satisfaction in it.

If we are to survive on this planet, there must be compromises.

Very rare, the intelligence of the heart. The intelligence of the whimsical brain is less rare, less attaching, sometimes tedious.

Language is memory and metaphor.

Failures to love are irremediable and irredeemable.

... 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.

I do not think about absent persons as often or with such intense longing as I think of places. They lie one below the other in my mind.

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.

I am never happier than when I am alone in a foreign city; it is as if I had become invisible.

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.

One of the uncovenanted benefits of living for a long time is that, having so many more dead than living friends, death can appear as a step backwards into the joyous past.

Not literature alone, but society itself is wormed and rotten when language ceases to be respected not merely by advertisers and politicians, but by persons of learning and authority.

In my firm, we dealt in lies. Advertising is that ... the skilful use of the truth to mislead, to spoil, to debase.

The strangest thing about life is not its frightful cruelty, but that it can be gentle.

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?

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

A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself.

No one asks public men to be strictly moral, but they must seem to be well-behaved.

My mind is not suited to go much into company.

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

In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma.

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

Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions.

There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification.

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

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.

A nation has honor precisely as it has fleas - on this or that body. The statesman who talks of honor - unless he means something else, quite different - is a rogue.

Great advertising is the expression of deep emotional sincerity.

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.

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