Top 89 Quotes & Sayings by Storm Jameson

Language is memory and metaphor.

The only way to live is to accept each minute as an unrepeatable miracle, which is exactly what it is: a miracle and unrepeatable.

Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.

For what I have received may the Lord make me truly thankful. And more truly for what I have not received.

The impossible talked of is less impossible from the moment words are laid to it.

Hope is a talent like any other.

Think of all the really successful men and women you know. Do you know a single one who didn't learn very young the trick of calling attention to himself in the right quarters?

... I used words without precautions. I wanted to disappear into them, I fled into the bovaryism of the writer trying to create an effect.

In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma.

I am never happier than when I am alone in a foreign city; it is as if I had become invisible.

The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.

No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker.

The strangest thing about life is not its frightful cruelty, but that it can be gentle.

Pornography is essentially reductive, an exercise in the nothing-but mode, a depersonalizing of the human beings involved, a showing-up of human lust as nothing but an affair of the genitals.

What I do not know and cannot even hope to understand before I die is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other ... What nerve has atrophied in the torturer, or worse is sensually moved?

The older I grow the more sharply I mistrust words. So few of them have any meaning left. It is impossible to write one sentence in which every word has the bareness and hardness of bones, the reality of the skeleton.

giving the utmost of herself to three absorbing interests [marriage, motherhood, career] ... was a problem for a superwoman, and a job for a superwoman, and only some such fabled being could have accomplished it with success.

A minor symptom of wars is the cancerous growth of committees.

War, for any cause, is inexcusable. There is nothing which excuses us for the beastly ingenuity of our wars. Only fools, only the diseased, think that we are served by killing the strong young men with machines.

Women will always put persons above ideas ... and so they'll always be defeated. Persons die, and ideas rule the world.

All pornography is to a degree sadistic - inevitably.

Truth is the only good and the purest pity. ... Men lie for profit or for pity. All lies turn to poison, but a lie that is told for pity or shame breeds such a host of ills that no power on earth can compass their redemption.

Could anything be absurder than a man? The animal who knows everything about himself--except why he was born and the meaning of his unique existence.

An animal is not cruel; it lives wholly in the instant leap on its prey, in the present taste of marrow or blood. Cruelty begins with the memory, and the pleasures of the memory are impure; they draw their strength along levels where no sun has reached.

In my firm, we dealt in lies. Advertising is that ... the skilful use of the truth to mislead, to spoil, to debase.

The young are so much more vulnerable than the old - the stuff is still warm and malleable, it takes impressions.

The least stupid question a man asks in his lifetime is not: Is there a God and is He a god or a devil? But: Brother, why are you killing me?

You can't argue with a raging want. You can, but it is useless.

There is a stage in any misery when the victim begins to find a deep satisfaction in it.

Nationalism will keep its venom until we succeed in creating an image of the nations of the whole world as so many provinces.

There is only one world; the world pressing against you at this minute. There is only one minute in which you are alive; this minute here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.

invaders always destroy libraries.

A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself.

Speaking the truth, once you have started it, is too exhilarating to draw back.

She did not so much cook as assassinate food.

Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow.

There is only one world the world pressing against you this minute.

Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are - gentleness, memory, and habit.

Lord, if there is a heartache Vienna cannot cure I hope never to feel it. I came home cured of everything except Vienna.

The critic's hankering to be law-giver rather than servant of literature is irrepressible.

Any marriage worth the name is no better than a series of beginnings - many of them abortive.

In what touches their social convictions, most persons do not think. The threat of change, with all it suggests to them in the loss of social and economic privilege, alarms so deeply that they are incapable of unprejudiced thought. They seem to themselves to be thinking, with lucidity and fairness, but since they start from the conviction that change must undoubtedly be for the worse or from settled grief at the thought of losing what is old and lovely, they are doing no more than following a logical sequence of ideas from a false premise.

I am persuaded that not a novel in ten thousand is of any use to a child to fit him for life. The most are of use only to unfit him -- to blunt his senses and infect him with the writers' poor silly sentiments. Nine out of ten novelists deserve to be prosecuted under an Adulterated Emotions Act.

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present.

There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification.

Surprise will be my last emotion, not fear.

... the truth is exactly that which can't be got into words. We are forced to lie, a little or, if we are inferior, much.

I do not think about absent persons as often or with such intense longing as I think of places. They lie one below the other in my mind.

My mind is not suited to go much into company.

When you talk of revolution ... you never talk of the day after.

If you think with enough energy about a hoped-for event, it will in the end happen. Not because you willed it. Because it was all the time in your nature.

a writer's first duty is to be clear. Clarity is an excellent virtue. Like all virtues it can be pursued at ruinous cost. Paid, so far as I am concerned, joyfully.

A joke is a joke or the image of a truth.

Failures to love are irremediable and irredeemable.

No one asks public men to be strictly moral, but they must seem to be well-behaved.

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present. Most of us spend fifty-nine minutes an hour living in the past, with regret for lost joys or shame for things badly done (both utterly useless and weakening) or in a future which we either long for or dread. . . . There is only one minute in which you are alive, this minute, here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle. Which is exactly what it is-a miracle and unrepeatable.

Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions.

Not literature alone, but society itself is wormed and rotten when language ceases to be respected not merely by advertisers and politicians, but by persons of learning and authority.

to grow old is to have taken away, one by one, all gifts of life, the food and wine, the music and the company. ... the gods unloose, one by one, the mortal fingers that cling to the edge of the table.

One of the uncovenanted benefits of living for a long time is that, having so many more dead than living friends, death can appear as a step backwards into the joyous past.