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Paul Fussell Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.

Paul Fussell
The worst thing about war was the sitting around and wondering what you were doing morally.

Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and it's fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.

To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.

If truth is the main casualty in war, ambiguity is another.

What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism; all else is publicity.

Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.

Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.

I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.

If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.

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.

The middles cleave to euphemisms not just because they're an aid in avoiding facts. They like them also because they assist their social yearnings towards pomposity. This is possible because most euphemisms permit the speaker to multiply syllables, and the middle class confuses sheer numerousness with weight and value.

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.

The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and conscience.

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.

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.

If you are an author and give one of your books to a member of the upper class, you must never expect him to read it.

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.


 Born: March 22, 1924
Died: May 23, 2012 (aged 88)
Bio: Paul Fussell, Jr. was an American cultural and literary historian, author and university professor. His writings cover a variety of topics, from scholarly works on eighteenth-century English literature to commentary on America's class system.
Most used word:
 Siegfried Sassoon
English Memoirist American Journalist Kingsley Amis
English Novelist
