After the Fireworks Quotes

“Because a writer can't influence people, in the sense of making them think and feel and act as he does. He can only influence them to be more, or less, like one of their own selves. In other words, he's never understood.”
― Aldous Huxley, After the Fireworks: Three Novellas – Lost Classic Fiction from the Author of Brave New World

“He had the enormous memory of royal personnages and family retainers - the memory of those who never read, or reason, or reflect, and whose minds therefore are wholly free to indulge in retrospect.”
― Aldous Huxley, After the Fireworks: Three Novellas – Lost Classic Fiction from the Author of Brave New World

“For Pamela, dinner in solitude, especially the public solitude of hotels, was a punishment. Companionlessness and compulsory silence depressed her. Besides, she never felt quite eye-proof; she could never escape from the obsession that every one was looking at her, judging, criticizing.”
― Aldous Huxley, After the Fireworks: Three Novellas – Lost Classic Fiction from the Author of Brave New World

“I see her as a kind of Midas, turning everything she touched into imagination.”
― Aldous Huxley, After the Fireworks: Three Novellas – Lost Classic Fiction from the Author of Brave New World

“But somehow something kind of went wrong on the way between the wanting and the saying. And then the doing seemed to go just as wrong as the saying. She always wanted to do things excitingly, romantically, like in a play. But you can't make things be exciting and romantic, can you?”
― Aldous Huxley, After the Fireworks: Three Novellas – Lost Classic Fiction from the Author of Brave New World

“But most admirers were like that; they thought they were doing you an enormous favour by admiring you. And how much more they admired themselves for being capable of appreciating than they admired the object of their appreciation! And then there were the earnest ones who thanked you for giving such a perfect expression to their ideas and sentiments. They were the worst of all. For, after all, what were they thanking you for? For being their interpreter, their dragoman, for playing John the Baptist to their Messiah.”
― Aldous Huxley, After the Fireworks: Three Novellas – Lost Classic Fiction from the Author of Brave New World

“The habit of their intimacy was of too long standing and, besides, old Colin was so useful, so bottomlessly reliable. So Judd remained for him the Oldest Friend whom one definitely dislikes; while for Judd, he was the Oldest Friend whom one adores and at the same time hates for not adoring back, the Oldest Friend whom one never sees enough of, but whom, when he is there, one finds insufferably exasperating, the Oldest Friend whom, in spite of all one's efforts, one is always getting on the nerves of.”
― Aldous Huxley, After the Fireworks: Three Novellas – Lost Classic Fiction from the Author of Brave New World

“You'd be the first to complain if people didn't write,' Judd rapped out. 'Here's your egg. Boiled for three minutes exactly. I saw to it myself.' Taking his egg, 'On the contrary,' Fanning answered, 'I'd be the first to rejoice. If people write, it means they exist; and all I ask is to be able to pretend that the world doesn't exist.”
― Aldous Huxley, After the Fireworks: Three Novellas – Lost Classic Fiction from the Author of Brave New World