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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.
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
Even
Seek
Joke
People
Regard
Narrative
Novel
Table
Hold
Thirty
Talent
Dirty
Attention
Tables
Announcing
Actually
Dinner
Devoid
Writing
Jokes
Seconds
More quotes by Paul Fussell
The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.
Paul Fussell
The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
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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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Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.
Paul Fussell
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.
Paul Fussell
Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way.
Paul Fussell
Anybody who notices unpleasant facts in the have-a-nice-day world we live in is going to be designated a curmudgeon.
Paul Fussell
The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and conscience.
Paul Fussell
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.
Paul Fussell
Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.
Paul Fussell
Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government. They learn, if they are lucky, humility.
Paul Fussell
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
Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.
Paul Fussell
If the term discussion has always seemed to me to imply mild warnings of wasted time, workshop sets off a clangorous alarm.
Paul Fussell
And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach.
Paul Fussell
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.
Paul Fussell
Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.
Paul Fussell
To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.
Paul Fussell
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.
Paul Fussell
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.
Paul Fussell
