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Jan Morris Quotes
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Like most writers, I think far too much about myself anyway, and in my heart of hearts don't think I am worth talking about in this way.
Jan Morris
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The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became. A adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming. If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.
Jan Morris
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Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.
Jan Morris
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I began to see that my imperial cockiness was nonsense and that the empire, in its last years at least, wasn't a bit arrogant, it wasn't a bit cocky.
Jan Morris
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The personality of St. John's, Newfoundland, hits you like a smack in the face with a dried cod, enthusiastically administered by its citizenry.
Jan Morris
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As to sex, the original pleasure, I cannot recommend too highly the advantages of androgyny.
Jan Morris
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A sex change is a very extraordinary thing for someone to have gone through and particularly extraordinary for a writer, I think. But although... the effects of it appear kind of subliminally through everything I've written, I don't believe I've created a work of art around it.
Jan Morris
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I was three or four when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl.
Jan Morris
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Buildings are seldom just buildings in downtown Chicago, they are Examples, and not a city on Earth, I swear, is as knowledgeably preoccupied with architectural meaning. Where else would a department store include in its advertisements the name of the architect who created it, or a newspaper property section throw in a scholarly exposition of theoretical design?
Jan Morris
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Vermonters, it seems to me, are like ethnics in their own land. They are exceedingly conscious of their difference from other Americans, and they talk a great deal about outsiders, newcomers, and people from the south.
Jan Morris
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Chicago's downtown seems to me to constitute, all in all, the best-looking twentieth-century city, the city where contemporary technique has best been matched by artistry, intelligence, and comparatively moderated greed. No doubt about it, if style were the one gauge, Chicago would be among the greatest of all the cities of the world.
Jan Morris
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I was born with the wrong body, being feminine by gender but male by sex, and I could achieve completeness only when the one was adjusted to the other.
Jan Morris
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The British came out of the Second World War an extremely tired and disillusioned nation, exemplified by the fact that they immediately gave the boot to their great hero, Winston Churchill. All they were interested in then was getting back to their island and trying to make it a more decent place to live. In that respect, the will to empire had most certainly gone.
Jan Morris
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Kashmir has always been more than a mere place. It has the quality of an experience, or a state of mind, or perhaps an ideal.
Jan Morris
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The city bursts with ideas as with traffic, a swirl of newness and surprise. Who can be bored in a city? If you are tired of one activity you can try something else, change your job, take your custom to another restaurant.
Jan Morris
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Wherever you go in life, you will feel somewhere over your shoulder a pink, castellated shimmering presence, the domes and riggings and crooked pinacles of the Serenissima
Jan Morris
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The genius of Canada remains essentially a deflationary genius.
Jan Morris
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To the stern student of affairs, Beirut is a phenomenon, beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.
Jan Morris
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I half cherish the hope that the end of history will be Swissness.
Jan Morris
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Venice is a cheek-by-jowl, back-of-the-hand, under-the-counter, higgledy-piggledy, anecdotal city, and she is rich in piquant wrinkled things, like an assortment of bric-a-brac in the house of a wayward connoisseur, or parasites on an oyster-shell.
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To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music.... It is the essentialness of oneself.
Jan Morris
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If there is one place in the United States where private styles make up for public images, it is San Francisco, where all lapsed lovers of America, even loyalists like me experiencing spasms of disillusionment, should be taken for refresher courses. The tides of all-American conformity beat vainly against the San Franciscan rock.
Jan Morris
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I resist the idea that travel writing has got to be factual. I believe in its imaginative qualities and its potential as art and literature.
Jan Morris
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Australia is a country not so much of fulfillment as of theatrical expectation.
Jan Morris
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Vermonters are not only charmless of manner, on the whole; they are also, as far as I can judge, utterly without pretence, and give the salutary impression that they don't care ten cents whether you are amused, affronted, intrigued, or bored stiff by them. Hardly anybody asked me how I liked Vermont. Not a soul said 'Have a nice day!'
Jan Morris
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Quote of the day
No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Carrie Chapman Catt
Jan Morris
Born:
October 2, 1926
Died:
November 20, 2020
(aged 94)
Bio:
Jan Morris was a Welsh historian, author and travel writer.
Known for:
Trieste and the meaning of nowhere (2001)
Venice (1960)
Conundrum (1974)
Last Letters from Hav (1985)
The world of Venice (1960)
Most used words:
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british
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