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Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travellers . . . seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns.

Paul Fussell

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Paul Fussell
Age: 88 †
Born: 1924
Born: March 22
Died: 2012
Died: May 23
Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Military Historian
University Teacher
Writer
Pasadena
California
Time
Three
Thus
Two
Minds
Travellers
Seems
Regard
Clowns
Persons
Travel
Traveller
Best
Seem
Inconsistent
Able
Hold
Truest
Ideas
Serious
Clown
Mind
Experience
Ironic

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If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.
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The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be.
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The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and conscience.
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And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach.
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Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.
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If the term discussion has always seemed to me to imply mild warnings of wasted time, workshop sets off a clangorous alarm.
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The balls used in top class games are generally smaller than those used in others.
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The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.
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Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.
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Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.
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Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way.
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Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline a constant 'paying off of old scores' and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances.
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The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
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Anybody who notices unpleasant facts in the have-a-nice-day world we live in is going to be designated a curmudgeon.
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Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience.
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Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.
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All the pathos and irony of leaving one's youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveller learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
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Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.
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To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.
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Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
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