iosephvs bibliothecarivs > Recent Status Updates

"In the most mean, cowardly, hypocritical way the British ruling class did all they could to hand Spain over to Franco and the Nazis. Why? Because they were pro-Fascist.... It is still very uncertain what plan they acted on in backing Franco, and they may have had no clear plan at all. Whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time...."

"When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions of slaves on whose backs civilization rested generation after generation have left behind them no record whatever. We do not even know their names."

"In England... our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run.... But why should it? What evidence is there that it does?"

"Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie... and I saw newspapers in London retelling these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened."

"A louse is a louse and a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you are fighting for happens to be just"

"The picture of war set forth in books like All Quiet on the Western Front is substantially true. Bullets hurt, corpses stink, men under fire are often so frightened that they wet their trousers."

"...men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them."

"All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have international aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible."

"On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time."

"The Don Quixote-Sancho Panza combination, which of course is simply the ancient dualism of body and soul in fiction form,... corresponds to something enduring in our civilization, not in the sense that either character is to found in a 'pure' state in real life, but in the sense that the two principles, noble folly and base wisdom, exist side by side in nearly every human being.... Almost certainly you are both.

"A recurrent, almost dominant motif in comic postcards is the... plump 'voluptuous' figure with the dress clinging to it as tightly as another skin and with breasts and buttocks grossly overemphasized.... There can be no doubt that these pictures lift the lid off a very widespread repression, natural enough in a country whose women when young tend to be slim to the point of skimpiness."

"The whole English-speaking world is haunted by the idea of human equality, and though it would be simply a lie to say that either we or the Americans have ever acted up to our professions, still, the idea is there, and it is capable of one day becoming a reality."

"In whatever shape England emerges from [World War II]... England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same."

"Political ignorance runs right through English official life, through Cabinet ministers, ambassadors, consuls, judges, magistrates, policemen. The policeman who arrests the 'red' does not understand the theories the 'red' is preaching; if he did his own position as bodyguard of the moneyed class might seem less pleasant to him."

William Butler Yeats was born on this day in 1865 🕯️

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

Happy birthday, W. B. Yeats! 🕯️

"Literature, especially poetry, and lyric poetry most of all, is a kind of family joke, with little or no value outside its own language-group. Except for Shakespeare, the best English poets are barely known in Europe, even as names. The only poets who are widely read are Byron, who is admired for the wrong reasons, and Oscar Wilde, who is pitied as a victim of English hypocrisy."

"It is quite true that the so-called races of Britain feel themselves to be very different from one another. A Scotsman, for instance, does not thank you if you call him an Englishman. You can see the hesitation we feel on this point by the fact that we call our islands by no less than six different names, England, Britain, Great Britain, the British Isles, the United Kingdom and, in very exalted moments, Albion."

"Yes, there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes."

"So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot."

"At bottom it is always a writer's tendency, his 'purpose', his 'message', that makes him liked or disliked. The proof of this is the extreme difficulty of seeing any literary merit in a book that seriously damages your deepest beliefs."

"Now and again there appears a novel that opens up a new world not by revealing what is strange, but by revealing what is familiar. The truly remarkable thing about Ulysses, for instance, is the commonplaceness of its material. Off course there is much more in Ulysses than this, because Joyce is a kind of poet and also an elephantine pedant, but his real achievement has been to get the familiar on to paper."

"In his own age and ours [Dickens] has been popular chiefly because he was able to express in a comic, simplified and therefore memorable form the native decency of the common man."

"There are no rules in novel writing, and for any work of art, there is only one test worth bothering about - survival."

"English novelists of the nineteenth century... felt at home in the world they lived in, whereas a writer nowadays is so hopelessly isolated that the typical modern novel is a novel about a novelist."

"The English, as [Thackeray] sees it, are invincible because of their tremendous physical strength, due mainly to living on beef."

"Books give off more and nastier dust than any other class of objects yet invented."

"Good prose is like a window pane."