The Unpossessed Quotes

“Listen, comrades!” shouted Bruno in a fury. “Don’t wait for the bandwagon to steamroller you, the ghost brigade is forming now, the corpse parade, the fellow-traveller charade; limp up and join us now, there’s room on our fence for every individual straddler in your number. Are you a tired radical? are you a parlor pink? are you a political pansy? are you a morbid individualist? are you a victim of the twentieth century social disease? do you have singed or clipped left wings? then climb right up and straddle with us.”
― Tess Slesinger, The Unpossessed

“You’re slipping up. Remember you’re not supposed to be human, you’re an intellectual. Humor is the intellectual’s favorite opiate and rationalization is his strongest virtue—an old slogan, my boy, from the early Roman days.”
― Tess Slesinger, The Unpossessed

“I hate you,” he said. “I know; and One day you will kill me,” she said wearily. “Only I won’t be here. And someone else will be. . .”
― Tess Slesinger, The Unpossessed

“Of course, I am; a Marxist intellectual, I should say.” He stirred and tasted; added another spoon of sugar. She wondered if his Revolution existed just as cocktails did, something for Jeffrey to enjoy.”
― Tess Slesinger, The Unpossessed

“The history of the human race,” he spoke gently as one might to a child, “at least each new step, each new transplanting, is always a stony thing, it takes more than a generation to recover from it.”
― Tess Slesinger, The Unpossessed

“To have the Magazine. . . . But it was the Idea that Bruno was in love with. As he saw his Idea tampered with, taken up, exposed, Filing Cabinets ordered to put it into action, it became less clear, less dear to him.”
― Tess Slesinger, The Unpossessed

“Filing Cabinets and progress—explain my defeatist inclinations, Emmett.”
― Tess Slesinger, The Unpossessed

“Soon the chestnut vendors would warm their hands in the whistling steam on their little wagons; the Scottsboro boys would be called for re-trial; butter would go up, eggs would go up.”
― Tess Slesinger, The Unpossessed

“oh of course, if Mr. Flinders is from New England then let us say no more about it, the least said about that sort of thing the better; and turned with admirable tact to potatoes.”
― Tess Slesinger, The Unpossessed

“He eyed Margaret with resentment; covertly; with suspicion. A womb (unpleasant thought!). She had never told him she possessed one. Was that where women went and sat, to brood, to count their injuries? Miles vaguely hated her.”
― Tess Slesinger, The Unpossessed