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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

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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.
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The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.
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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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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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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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What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism all else is publicity.
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Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.
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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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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 wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience.
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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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The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be.
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