During five literary generations every enlightened person had despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.
What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.
Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.
The end was contained in the beginning.
Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.
It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith – as mysterious as faith itself.
You were the dead; theirs was the future.
Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.
And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?
Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.
Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that can be given a name.
Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse – hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.
If one harbors anywhere in one’s mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, though in a sense known to be true, are inadmissable.
Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase in pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop.
Perhaps it is only when people are somewhere near the starvation level that they have anything to sing about.
It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand.
Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.
So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.
I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.