Storm Jameson Quotes

83 Sourced Quotes

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

Storm Jameson
Writers sometimes talk as though they were the only friends of civilization. This is their conceit. But they have special powers to serve — or to corrupt — civilization, and are obliged to use them.

Storm Jameson
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.

Storm Jameson
He's got tired of her now, has Martin. He said she took so much worshiping she made his knees sore.

Storm Jameson
She was obstinate... if she were hard pressed, she would seem to give way at every point and having thus misled the enemy would be found later in quiet possession of all the disputed ground.

Storm Jameson
Mere human beings can't afford to be fanatical about anything... Not even about justice or loyalty. The fanatic for justice ends by murdering a million helpless people to clear a space for his law-courts. If we are to survive on this planet, there must be compromises.

Storm Jameson
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.

Storm Jameson
We do not remember people as they were. What we remember is the effect they had on us then, but we remember it through an emotion charged with all that has since happened to us.

Storm Jameson
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.

Storm Jameson
Very rare, the intelligence of the heart. The intelligence of the whimsical brain is less rare, less attaching, sometimes tedious.

Storm Jameson
She had an intellect masculine in its range and detachment — a type of intellect possessed by some women in all ages, not, as they are apt to suppose it, the peculiar possession of modern women.

Storm Jameson
Novelists who treat violence and cruelty as something to be exploited for their effect, or to enjoy the pleasure of an evacuation, are carriers of a singularly unpleasant disease.

Storm Jameson
In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma.

Storm Jameson
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.

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

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

Storm Jameson
She had a passion for hats, none of which returned her affection.

Storm Jameson
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.

Storm Jameson
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.

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

Storm Jameson
Why did no one, not one person, turn me round at that time and order me to look at myself? But no one has the right to be saved from outside, by another hand.

Storm Jameson
All writers who can claim to be called 'living' must be political in a sense. They must have what the Quakers call a concern to understand what is happening in the world, and must engage themselves, in their writing, to promote no comfortable lies, of the sort which people will pay well to be told rather than the truth.

Storm Jameson
In Europe, war is a disease which has been in the family for generations: no one is surprised when it makes another leap. Even the patient only attends to it with part of his mind.

Storm Jameson