Burmese Days Quotes

“Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“To talk, simply to talk! It sounds so little, and how much it is! When you have existed to the brink of middle age in bitter loneliness, among people to whom your true opinion on every subject on earth is blasphemy, the need to talk is the greatest of all needs.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“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.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“it is a corrupting thing to live one's real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.”
― George Orwell , Burmese Days

“A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“Envy is a horrible thing. It is unlike all other kinds of suffering in that there is no disguising it, no elevating it into tragedy. It is more than merely painful, it is disgusting.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“An earthquake is such fun when it is over.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“We walk about under a load of memories which we long to share and
somehow never can.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“...it is perhaps one's own fault, to see oneself drifting, rotting, in dishonour and horrible futility, and all the while knowing that somewhere within one there is the possibility of a decent human being.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“Like the crocodile, he strikes always at the weakest spot.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“Much better hang wrong fellow than no fellow.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“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.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“There is nothing like an earthquake for drawing people together. One more tremor, or perhaps two, and they would have asked the butler to sit down at table with them.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“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. But who that has not suffered it understands the pains of exile?”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“When a man has a black face, suspicion is proof.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“In the end the secrecy of your revolt poisons you like a secret disease. Your whole life is a life of lies. Year after year you sit in Kipling-haunted little Clubs, whisky to right of you, Pink’un to left of you, listening and eagerly agreeing while Colonel Bodger develops his theory that these bloody Nationalists should be boiled in oil. You hear your Oriental friends called ‘greasy Little babus’, and you admit, dutifully, that they are greasy little babus. You see louts fresh from school kicking grey-haired servants. The time comes when you burn with hatred of your own countrymen, when you long for a native rising to drown their Empire in blood. And in this there is nothing honourable, hardly even any sincerity. For, au fond, what do you care if the Indian Empire is a despotism, if Indians are bullied and exploited? You only care because the right of free speech is denied you. You are a creature of the despotism, a pukka sahib, tied tighter than a monk or a savage by an unbreakable system of taboos.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“When one does get any credit in this life, it is usually for something that one has not done.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“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”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days: A Powerful Exploration of Colonialism and Identity from George Orwell

“Like all man who have lived much alone, he adjusted himself better to ideas than to people.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“It is a disagreeable thing when one’s close friend is not one’s social equal; but it is a thing native to the very air of India.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days: A Powerful Exploration of Colonialism and Identity from George Orwell

“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? A spiritual Mrs Wititterly? A Hamlet without poetry? Perhaps. And if so, did that make it any more bearable? It is not the less bitter because it is perhaps one’s own fault, to see oneself drifting, rotting, in dishonour and horrible futility, and all the while knowing that somewhere within one there is the possibility of a decent human being.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“The Burmese say that when you kill one of these birds they vomit, meaning to say, "Look, here is all I possess, and I've taken nothing of yours. Why do you kill me?”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“In any town in India the European Club is the spiritual citadel, the real seat of the British power, the Nirvana for which native officials and millionaires pine in vain.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“God, if they’d only break out and rebel properly for once!’ he said to Ellis before starting. ‘But it’ll be a bloody washout as usual. Always the same story with these rebellions—peter out almost before they’ve begun. Would you believe it, I’ve never fired my gun at a fellow yet, not even a dacoit. Eleven years of it, not counting the War, and never killed a man. Depressing.’ ‘Oh,”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days: A Powerful Exploration of Colonialism and Identity from George Orwell

“They plunged into an enormous and eager conversation, first about books, then about shooting, in which the girl seemed to have an interest and about which she persuaded Flory to talk. She was quite thrilled when he described the murder of an elephant which he had perpetrated some years earlier.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days: A Powerful Exploration of Colonialism and Identity from George Orwell

“As a magistrate his methods were simple. Even for the vastest bribe he would never sell the decision of a case, because he knew that a magistrate who gives wrong judgments is caught sooner or later. His practice, a much safer one, was to take bribes from both sides and then decide the case on strictly legal grounds. This won him a useful reputation for impartiality.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days: A Powerful Exploration of Colonialism and Identity from George Orwell

“When you have existed to the brink of middle age in bitter loneliness, among people your true opinion on every subject on earth is blasfemy, the need to talk is the greatest of all needs.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“Is there anything in the world more graceless, more dishonouring, than to desire a woman whom you will never have? Throughout”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“She was italicising every other word, with that deadly, glittering brightness that a woman puts on when she is dodging a moral obligation. He”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“Could the Burmese trade for themselves? Can they make machinery, ships, railways, roads? They are helpless without you. What would happen to the Burmese forests if the English were not here? They would be sold immediately to the Japanese, who would gut them and ruin them. Instead of which, in your hands, actually they are improved. And while your business men develop the resources of our country, your officials are civilising us, elevating us to their level, from pure public spirit. It is a magnificent record of self-sacrifice.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days