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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.

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
Tradition
Conscience
Present
Imagination
Shrivels
Art
Rots
Past
Corrupts
Mind
Pretending
Thus

More quotes by Paul Fussell

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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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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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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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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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Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.
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If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.
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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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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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What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism all else is publicity.
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Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience.
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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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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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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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Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.
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Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
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The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
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The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be.
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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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Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way.
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