Quote

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.

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
Wise
Thus
Joyous
Moment
Leaving
Traveler
Moments
Travel
Traveled
Recovered
Firsts
Places
Repeat
Pathos
First
Youth
Tries
Implicit
Trying
Behinds
Repeats
Traveller
Every
Behind
Irony
Successes
Never
Joy
Wander
Learns

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The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
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Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
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Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and it's fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment.
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The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be.
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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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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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Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice. ... They have experienced secretly and privately their natural human impulse toward sadism and brutality... Not merely did I learn to kill with a noose of piano wire put around somebody's neck from behind, but I learned to enjoy the prospect of killing that way.
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Most people who seek attention and regard by announcing that they're writing a novel are actually so devoid of narrative talent that they can't hold the attention of a dinner table for thirty seconds, even with a dirty joke.
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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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Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.
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Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.
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Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.
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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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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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