Burmese Days

by George Orwell

When a man has a black face, suspicion IS proof.

They build a prison and call it progress,’ he added rather regretfully— for the doctor would not recognize the allusion.

In the dark evening, after a quite idle day, one’s ennui reaches a pitch that is frantic, suicidal. Work, prayer, books, drinking, talking— they are all powerless against it; it can only be sweated out through the pores of the skin.

He had sweated himself into a better mood.

A pang went through Flory. Alone, alone, the bitterness of being alone! So often like this, in lonely places in the forest, he would come upon something— bird, flower, tree—beautiful beyond all words, if there had been a soul with whom to share it. Beauty is meaningless until it is shared. If he had one person, just one, to halve his loneliness!

A boy does not start his career nicknamed Monkey-bum without learning his lesson.

Flory took to reading voraciously, and learned to live in books when life was tiresome.

For as his brain developed—you cannot stop your brain developing, and it is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life—he had grasped the truth about the English and their Empire.

Did all his trouble, then, simply boil down to that? Just complicated, unmanly whinings; poor-little-rich-girl stuff? Was he no more than a loafer using his idleness to invent imaginary woes?

Painting is the only art that can be practised without either talent or hard work.

It is my belief that these women lie awake at nights thinking of new ways to torment their servants.’

It is devilish to suffer from a pain that is all but nameless. Blessed are they who are stricken only with classifiable diseases! Blessed are the poor, the sick, the crossed in love, for at least other people know what is the matter with them and will listen to their belly-achings with sympathy.

Have you got some picture of the life we live here? The foreignness, the solitude, the melancholy! Foreign trees, foreign flowers, foreign landscapes, foreign faces. It’s all as alien as a different planet. But do you see— and it’s this that I so want you to understand—do you see, it mightn’t be so bad living on a different planet, it might even be the most interesting thing imaginable, if you had even one person to share it with. One person who could see it with eyes something like your own.

All Englishmen are virtuous when they are dead.

There is no armour against fate.