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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.

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
Wasted
Warning
Warnings
Sets
Workshop
Discussion
Imply
Seemed
Mild
Term
Alarm
Always
Workshops
Time
Alarms

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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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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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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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Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
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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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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.
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What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism all else is publicity.
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The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
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Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government. They learn, if they are lucky, humility.
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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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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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So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past.So many dreams lost in the madness that had engulfed us.Except for a few widely scattered shouts of joy,the survivors of the abyss sat hollow-eyed and silent, trying to comprehend a world without war.
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Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.
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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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Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.
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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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A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.
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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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