1930s Quotes

“1) Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2) Start no more new books, add no more new material to "Black Spring."
3) Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4) Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5) When you can't create you can work.
6) Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7) Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8) Don't be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9) Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10) Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11) Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.”
― Henry Miller

“For however inhospitable the wind, from this vantage point Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise - that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“Fairy tales only happen in movies."
-George Melies

from The Invention of Hugo Cabret”
― Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret

“The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her—her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever-seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that ‘It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,’ and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her—understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“But let us turn back to the tragic events of February 6. The story of the riots may be briefly told. A riot in France is one of the most remarkable things in the world. The frenzied combatants maintain perfect discipline. Seventeen people were barbarously killed, and several thousand injured, but there was no fighting at all between about seven-thirty p.m. and nine, when everyone took time out for dinner. When it started, no one thought of revolution; it was just a nice big riot. Communists, royalists, Fascists, socialists, fought shoulder to shoulder under both red flag and tricolor against the police and Garde Mobile. The fighting stopped on the stroke of twelve, because the Paris Metro (underground) stops running at twelve-thirty, and no one wanted to walk all the way home. Bloody, bandaged, fighters and police jostled their way into the trains together. Promptly at seven-thirty next morning the fighting started again. – John Gunther, Inside Europe pg. 154-155”
― John Gunther, Inside Europe

“When I was a schoolboy in England, the old bound volumes of Kipling in the library had gilt swastikas embossed on their covers. The symbol's 'hooks' were left-handed, as opposed to the right-handed ones of the Nazi hakenkreuz, but for a boy growing up after 1945 the shock of encountering the emblem at all was a memorable one. I later learned that in the mid-1930s Kipling had caused this 'signature' to be removed from all his future editions. Having initially sympathized with some of the early European fascist movements, he wanted to express his repudiation of Hitlerism (or 'the Hun,' as he would perhaps have preferred to say), and wanted no part in tainting the ancient Indian rune by association. In its origin it is a Hindu and Jainas symbol for light, and well worth rescuing.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“There were legions of her kind during the nineteen-thirties, women from the age of thirty and upward, who crowded into their war-bereaved spinsterhood with voyages of discovery into new ideas and energetic practices in art and social welfare, education or religion.”
― Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

“Russell’s lips were just framing an expression of disapproval when Grace stepped around Violet. His pupils expanded, making his dark eyes look even darker. There was something almost greedy in this look he bestowed on Grace.
--Farewell My Life: Buona Notte Vita Mia”
― Cynthia Sally Haggard, Farewell My Life: Buona Notte Vita Mia

“Mr. Russell, don’t you think I’m too young for you?”
His eyes flashed as his face hardened into a mask.
--Farewell My Life: Buona Notte Vita Mia”
― Cynthia Sally Haggard, Farewell My Life: Buona Notte Vita Mia

“Mr. Russell—this is awkward—Mother is not happy—She told me never to see you again.”
The force of his glare thrust her back on her heels.
--Farewell My Life, Buona Notte Vita Mia”
― Cynthia Sally Haggard, Farewell My Life: Buona Notte Vita Mia

“It was the influence of the Great Depression, recycling, thriftiness, stocking up to the point of hoarding for fear of being without. ... She [Rhea Leen] remembered coming home from school before Jean [Billie Jean Parker] got off work to a cold, empty house, and finding only one can of soup in the cupboard, heating the soup and eating only half of it, saving the rest for he aunt. Rather remembered ... when her father took a job as a janitor because his savings had been wiped out in the crash of 1929 and there were no other jobs. He always distrusted banks thereafter, refusing to do business with them, preferring to bury his money in the yard. He was not alone.”
― John Neal Phillips, My Life with Bonnie and Clyde

“I talk of those incidents [with Bonnie and Clyde] as if I were not a part of any of it, like a character in a book I once read. It’s the only way I keep from going crazy. Maybe we were all pretty young then, but we knew what we were doing. Clyde never held a gun to my head. I was there because I wanted to be! What’s that they say in the movies? ‘The show must go on!’ Well, life goes on.”
― Blanche Caldwell Barrow, My Life with Bonnie and Clyde

“Actually, despite his earlier vow to one day raid Eastham, Clyde Barrow tried to go straight when he was paroled. He first helped his father make preparations to put an addition onto the service station, then traveled to Framingham, Massachusetts, to take a job and get away from his past in Texas. However, he quickly grew homesick and returned to Dallas to work for United Glass and Mirror, one of his former employers. It was then that local authorities began picking Barrow up almost daily, often taking him away from his job. There was a standing policy at the time to basically harass excons. Barrow was never charged with anything, but he soon lost his job. He told his mother, in the presence of Blanche Barrow and Ralph Fults, 'Mama, I'm never gonna work again. And I'll never stand arrest, either. I'm not ever going back to that Eastham hell hole. I'll die first! I swear it, they're gonna have to kill me.' ... Mrs. J. W. Hays, wife of former Dallas County Sheriff's Deputy John W. “Preacher” Hays, said, 'if the Dallas police had left that boy [Clyde Barrow] alone, we wouldn't be talking about him today.”
― John Neal Phillips, My Life with Bonnie and Clyde

“[At Eastham, probably after sexual abuse]: In Barrow's own words to Fults, 'I'd like to shoot all these damned guards and turn everybody loose.' Fults, initially unimpressed by the diminutive Barrow, later noted the change he witnessed. 'I seen him change from a schoolboy to a rattlesnake. He got real bitter.' ... This is echoed by members of the Barrow family who noted a distinct difference in Barrow's personality after his 1932 parole. According to his sister Marie, 'Something awful sure must have happened to him in prison, because he wasn't the same person when he got out.”
― John Neal Phillips, My Life with Bonnie and Clyde

“Of her portrayal in the 1967 movie, Bonnie and Clyde, Blanche said, 'That movie made me out like a screaming horse's ass!' ... 'I was too busy moving bodies [to act hysterical],' Blanche herself said. ... Her image in this memoir, as well as in Fugitives and in Cumie Barrow's manuscript, was fashioned at a time when Blanche could have easily been charged with the Joplin murders. That may account for the great difference in tone Between Blanche, the young convict in Missouri State Penitentiary, and Blanche, the elder ex-fugitive. Indeed, at least one of Blanche Barrows' champions, Wilbur Winkler, the Deni— son man who co-owned (along with Artie Barrow Winkler) the Cinderella Beauty Shoppe, used Fugitives to try to obtain a parole for Blanche from the Missouri Board of Probation and Parole. In letters to the Platte County prosecutor and the judge involved in Blanche's case, Winkler alluded to the book's description of Blanche in Joplin in an effort to win their support for her release: 'Blanch [sic] ran hysterical [tic] thru [sit] the gunfire down the street carrying [her] dog in her arms,' Winkler wrote. He even sent copies of the book to them—and to others.”
― John Neal Phillips, My Life with Bonnie and Clyde

“[W.D.] Jones later commented that people frequently helped them, 'Not because it was Bonnie and Clyde. People in them days just helped—no questions asked.”
― John Neal Phillips, My Life with Bonnie and Clyde

“The fat woman came and offered us Turkish cigarettes and little red cubes of sweet stuff that smelled like soap and tasted like hell”
― Cameron McCabe, The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor

“There is something wrong with coppers' I said. 'You can't punch them in the jaw when you want to.”
― Cameron McCabe, The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor

“To clear up a murder you must do your own killing”
― Cameron McCabe, The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor

“She was not trying to hide something; nothing she might have tried to hide was left in her”
― Cameron McCabe, The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor

“The rest of us have to play along with God’s little game of Russian roulette, His eternal lesson to live it up while you can. And far be it for me to turn away from God—let’s get a drink.”
― Pamela Hamilton, Lady Be Good: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale

“Heartless gossips pose as professional press, they get a few quotes and run with the story like Seabiscuit to the finish line. They’re nothing more than conmen, salesmen, pitchmen, pompous men professing to be of public service—and they have the freedom to do so. There’s no price to pay.”
― pamela hamilton, Lady Be Good: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale

“Wilhelm Otto held out his hand as the orchestra started a Strauss waltz. Did the man never speak when a look would do? I considered his outstretched hand with trepidation, remembering weeping in his auto, that same hand clutched in mine. In that moment, I had felt safe with him. Now I did not know what to feel. Was the person before me a different man? Or the same?”
― Stephanie Landsem, Code Name Edelweiss

“If not us, who? If not now, when? It must be us, and it must be now. I would fight this war. I would not be silent!”
― Stephanie Landsem, Code Name Edelweiss

“The world is a dangerous place, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it. - Albert Einstein”
― Paul Levine, Midnight Burning

“In the 1930s, Reich began to measure these energetic shifts in therapy. He noticed that real arousal causes the skin’s electrical charge to rise, especially in the sensitive areas of the body.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“With all due respect, Captain ... I can't find the silverware drawer.”
― Hanna Kraft, The New Diary

“No screaming of shells, no thunder of guns, only this close, hard pressure of human bodies, this desperate push of starving men.”
― Dot Allan, Makeshift & Hunger March: Two Novels

“In the thick and stagnant darkness John Stark lay wide awake.”
― A. McArthur, No Mean City

“Yard after yard passed by, the berths empty, the grass growing about the sinking keel blocks. And now only the gaunt, dumb poles and groups of men, workless, watching in silence the bitter passage of the vessel.”
― George Blake, The Shipbuilders