Top 38 Paul Fussell Quotes
#1. And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach.
Paul Fussell
#2. The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and conscience.
Paul Fussell
#3. Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.
Paul Fussell
#4. Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.
Paul Fussell
#5. Irony is the attendant of hope and the fuel of hope is innocence.
Paul Fussell
#6. All the pathos and irony of leaving one's youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveller learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
Paul Fussell
#7. Anybody who notices unpleasant facts in the have-a-nice-day world we live in is going to be designated a curmudgeon.
Paul Fussell
#8. When the Allies bombed the Italians on the island of Pantelleria in June, 1943, General Spaatz, of the United States Air Corps, concluded that bombing can reduce to the point of surrender any first-class nation now in existence, within six months.
Paul Fussell
#9. To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.
Paul Fussell
#10. Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of judgement.
Paul Fussell
#11. Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government. They learn, if they are lucky, humility.
Paul Fussell
#12. Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.
Paul Fussell
#13. If the term discussion has always seemed to me to imply mild warnings of wasted time, workshop sets off a clangorous alarm.
Paul Fussell
#14. If the guidebook used to be critical, today it seems largely a celebratory adjunct to the publicity operations of hotels, resorts, and even countries.
Paul Fussell
#15. If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.
Paul Fussell
#16. The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask to
be imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified.
Paul Fussell
#17. 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.
Paul Fussell
#18. Things without defense: insects, kittens, small boys.
Paul Fussell
#19. 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.
Paul Fussell
#20. If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.
Paul Fussell
#21. A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.
Paul Fussell
#22. Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travellers ... seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns.
Paul Fussell
#23. Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.
Paul Fussell
#24. Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.
Paul Fussell
#25. When ... asked what I am writing, I have answered, "A book about social class in America," ... It is if I had said, "I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.
Paul Fussell
#26. The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be.
Paul Fussell
#27. The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower your class.
Paul Fussell
#28. The balls used in top class games are generally smaller than those used in others.
Paul Fussell
#29. Anyone telling about his travels must be a liar, ... for if a traveler doesn't visit his narrative with the spirit and techniques of fiction, no one will want to hear it.
Paul Fussell
#30. The worst thing about war was the sitting around and wondering what you were doing morally.
Paul Fussell
#31. Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
Paul Fussell
#32. Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way.
Paul Fussell
#33. I find nothing more depressing than optimism.
Paul Fussell
#34. 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.
Paul Fussell
#36. If truth is the main casualty in war, ambiguity is another.
Paul Fussell
#37. Another reason is that the letters are almost always funny, offering readers the spectacle of some pompous self-celebrator given ample ironic room in which to parade his self-solicited hurt.
Paul Fussell
#38. What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism; all else is publicity.
Paul Fussell
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top