Kristy Knowles’s Reviews > Down and Out in Paris and London > Status Update

" 'It seems to me that what you take a man's money he's fit for nothing for that moment.'

'No, not necessarily. If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, "I'm free man in *here*" ' - he tapped his forehead - 'and you're all right.' "

"Like most tramps, he was passionately mean about matches. He had a box of matches when I met him, but I never saw him strike one, and he used to lecture me for extravagance when I struck mine. His method was to cadge a light from strangers, sometimes going for without a smoke for half an hour rather than strike a match."

"For the first time I noticed, too, how the attitude of women varies with a man's clothes. When a badly dressed man passes them they shudder away from him with a quiet frank movement of disgust, as though he were a dead cat. Clothes are powerful things. Dressed in a tramps clothes it is very difficult, at any rate for the first day, not to feel that you are genuinely degraded."

"For many men in the quarter, unmarried ans with no future to think of, the weekly drinking-bout was the one thing that made life worth living."

"The waiters outlook is quite different. He is too proud in a way of his skill, but his skill is chiefly in being servile. His work gives him the mentality, not of a workman, but of a snob. He lives perpetually in sight of rich people, stands at their tables, listens to their conversations, sucks up to them with smiles and discreet little jokes. He has the pleasure of spending money by proxy."