Quote

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

More quotes by Paul Fussell

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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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Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
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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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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
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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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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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Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional 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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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 balls used in top class games are generally smaller than those used in others.
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If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.
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The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
Paul Fussell
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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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Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.
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The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.
Paul Fussell
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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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What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism all else is publicity.
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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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Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.
Paul Fussell