Paul Fussell Quotes
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Today the Somme is a peaceful but sullen place, unforgetting and unforgiving. ... To wander now over the fields destined to extrude their rusty metal fragments for centuries is to appreciate in the most intimate way the permanent reverberations of July, 1916. When the air is damp you can smell rusted iron everywhere, even though you see only wheat and barley.
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Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
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I find nothing more depressing than optimism.
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To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.
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I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.
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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.
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If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.
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Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.
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The balls used in top class games are generally smaller than those used in others.
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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.
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All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel
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Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.
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There is no Apocalypse.
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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.
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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.
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"Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice." ... They have experienced secretly and privately their natural human impulse toward sadism and brutality... Not merely did I learn to kill with a noose of piano wire put around somebody's neck from behind, but I learned to enjoy the prospect of killing that way.
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Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way.
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The worst thing about war was the sitting around and wondering what you were doing morally.
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The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be.
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The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and conscience.
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Anybody who notices unpleasant facts in the have-a-nice-day world we live in is going to be designated a curmudgeon.
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Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government. They learn, if they are lucky, humility.
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If the term discussion has always seemed to me to imply mild warnings of wasted time, workshop sets off a clangorous alarm.
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And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach.
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If the guidebook used to be critical, today it seems largely a celebratory adjunct to the publicity operations of hotels, resorts, and even countries.
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If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.
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Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.
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Things without defense: insects, kittens, small boys.
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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.
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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.
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