Storm Jameson Quotes

83 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Storm Jameson
It's an illusion to think that more comfort means more happiness. Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.

Storm Jameson
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.

Storm Jameson
An intelligent man or woman willing to make a career of reviewing fiction is hard to come by... And the temporaries do the work cheaply. Moreover, continuity may be got at the expense of intellectual arthritis; a reviewer who has been at his grisly task for half a lifetime may stiffen into prejudices of every sort, and become too anchylosed to do better than turn his back to a new wave when it rushes down on him.

Storm Jameson
The whole of society in Washington is to some degree political. It is like no other capital city known to me, in that political thinking, the whole business, technical and personal, of politics, is not diluted by an equal interest in art, industry, amusement, anything you like. I don't meant that these are non-existent in Washington -- only that they are subdued to the ruling passion.

Storm Jameson
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.

Storm Jameson
Inevitably, the flood of literary pornography loosed on us is dulling our reactions of surprise or shock. Its writers are forced to raise the ante, to provide stronger and stronger stimulants. Or try to provide them, since both the manner, the naming of parts and the few inexpressive four-letter words, and the matter, are narrowly limited.

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

Storm Jameson
Vitality... that dangerous divine gift she had in such abundance, the one gift that no art could counterfeit, and the one the gods give least often and with least wish to be kind.

Storm Jameson
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.

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

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

Storm Jameson
Is it really beyond our wits to devise some form of censorship which would trap only the crudely sadistic?

Storm Jameson
The Crown [Hotel] did not so much cook as assassinate food.

Storm Jameson
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?

Storm Jameson
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.

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

Storm Jameson
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.

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

Storm Jameson
Sadistic literature is not only inhumane. It is anti-human.

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

Storm Jameson
To reject censorship after studying the risks involved is very well. To reject it ex cathedra, in the tones of Calvin pronouncing a dogma, eyes and mind closed to the possible consequences, the even marginally possible, is to make things too comfortable for oneself.

Storm Jameson
Each time that I have run away — and from a habit it quickly became an illness — I have betrayed someone. Myself, but not always only myself.

Storm Jameson
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 life?

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

Storm Jameson
Language is one of the thin walls humanity has built up over centuries against its own bestial and destructive impulses.

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

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

Storm Jameson
The hunger of the spirit for eternity — as fierce as a starving man's for bread — is much less a craving to go on living than a craving for redemption. Oh, and a protest against absurdity.

Storm Jameson