The 40s Quotes

“Even though the wreckage had been described to her, and though she was still in pain, the sight horrified and amazed her, and there was something she noticed about it that particularly gave her the creeps. Over everything—up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks—was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city’s bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them. Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goose-foot, morning glories and day lilies, the hairy-fruited bean, purslane and clotbur and sesame and panic grass and feverfew. Especially in a circle at the center, sickle senna grew in extraordinary regeneration, not only standing among the charred remnants of the same plant but pushing up in new places, among bricks and through cracks in the asphalt. It actually seemed as if a load of sickle-senna seed had been dropped along with the bomb.”
― The New Yorker, The 40s: The Story of a Decade

“In Sartre’s version—to skip altogether the structure of philosophical reasoning on which it is made to rest and which Sartre has set forth at length in a book called L’Etre et le Néant—it places man in a world without God (thought not all Existentialists are atheists), in which all the moral values are developed by man himself. Human nature is not permanent and invariable: it is whatever man himself makes it, and it changes from age to age. Man is free, beyond certain limits, to choose what he is to be and do. His life has significance solely in its relation to the lives of others—in his actions or refrainings from action: to use a favorite phrase of Sartre’s, the individual must “engage himself.”
― The New Yorker, The 40s: The Story of a Decade

“The world knows it can’t win. Let me whisper I love you while we are dancing and the lights are low.”
― The New Yorker, The 40s: The Story of a Decade

“His distinctive work as a radical intellectual became the criticism of liberal and radical thought wherever it deteriorated to shibboleth and dogma. No one knows better than he how willing is the intellectual Left to enter the prison of its own mass mind, nor does anyone believe more directly than he in the practical consequences of thought, or understand more clearly the enormous power, for good or bad, that ideology exerts in an unstable world.”
― The New Yorker, The 40s: The Story of a Decade

“But he knows that the war, at its deepest level (the first battle of the war now on your front pages), is a war between those who deny life and those who affirm it. And if it is not yet such a war, it must become so, or it will, no matter who wins, have been fought in vain.”
― The New Yorker, The 40s: The Story of a Decade

“The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician,” he says. “Things like the old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night, or something someone said long ago. I remember I once wrote a sixty-four-bar piece about a memory of when I was a little boy in bed and heard a man whistling on the street outside, his footsteps echoing away. Things like these may be more important to a musician than technique.”
― The New Yorker, The 40s: The Story of a Decade

“It was the last two days of the Nuremberg trial that I went abroad to see. Those men who had wanted to kill me and my kind and who had nearly had their wish were to be told whether I and my kind were to kill them and why. Quite an occasion.”
― The New Yorker, The 40s: The Story of a Decade

“There are thirteen million women in the United States between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight. All of them were eligible to compete for the title of Miss America in the annual contest staged in Atlantic City last month if they were high-school graduates, were not and had never been married, and were not Negroes.”
― The New Yorker, The 40s: The Story of a Decade

“Every war cleaves time.”
― The New Yorker, The 40s: The Story of a Decade

“Although all three of us knew that the war was lost, we could not believe it. The rouget tasted too much as good rouget always had; the black-browed proprietor was too normally solicitous; even in the full bosom and strong legs of the waitress there was the assurance that this life in Paris would never end.”
― The New Yorker, The 40s: The Story of a Decade

“Panter-Downes says of her English countrymen, “The behavior of all classes is so magnificent that no observer here could ever imagine these people following the French into captivity.”
― The New Yorker, The 40s: The Story of a Decade

“apartment Tuesday night, Eglée was saying she felt sure Jean-Pierre was dead. Henri said that was”
― The New Yorker, The 40s: The Story of a Decade