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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.

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
Without
Posts
Requires
Pulses
Pressure
Facto
Present
Illumination
Feeling
Exes
Understanding
Pulse
Feelings
Pretending
Past
Post

More quotes by Paul Fussell

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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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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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The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
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Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.
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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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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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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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If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.
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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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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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Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way.
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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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Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.
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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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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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The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be.
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Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.
Paul Fussell