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Fear is the deep motive of abstract art - fear of a repellent civilization which is dominated by the power of things. ... who can be surprised if, more sensitive than the others, the artist is terrified by the power things have acquired over us?

Storm Jameson

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Storm Jameson
Age: 95 †
Born: 1891
Born: January 8
Died: 1986
Died: September 30
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Whitby
North Yorkshire
Margaret Storm Jameson
Margaret Ethel Storm Jameson
Fear
Acquired
Artist
Terrified
Art
Surprised
Others
Motive
Power
Abstract
Things
Sensitive
Civilization
Repellent
Deep
Dominated

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Lord, if there is a heartache Vienna cannot cure I hope never to feel it. I came home cured of everything except Vienna.
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The critic's hankering to be law-giver rather than servant of literature is irrepressible.
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Critics have been amusing themselves for a long time by auscultating fiction for signs of heart failure.
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You can't argue with a raging want. You can, but it is useless.
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Novelists who treat violence and cruelty as something to be exploited for their effect, or to enjoy the pleasure of an evacuation, are carriers of a singularly unpleasant disease.
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Could anything be absurder than a man? The animal who knows everything about himself--except why he was born and the meaning of his unique existence.
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As often as not our whole self...engages itself in the most trivial of things, the shape of a particular hill, a road in the town in which we lived as children, the movement of wind in grass. The things we shall take with us when we die will nearly all be small things.
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Sadistic literature is not only inhumane. It is anti-human.
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The hunger of the spirit for eternity - as fierce as a starving man's for bread - is much less a craving to go on living than a craving for redemption. Oh, and a protest against absurdity.
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A nation has honor precisely as it has fleas - on this or that body. The statesman who talks of honor - unless he means something else, quite different - is a rogue.
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To reject censorship after studying the risks involved is very well. To reject it ex cathedra, in the tones of Calvin pronouncing a dogma, eyes and mind closed to the possible consequences, the even marginally possible, is to make things too comfortable for oneself.
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Pornography is essentially reductive, an exercise in the nothing-but mode, a depersonalizing of the human beings involved, a showing-up of human lust as nothing but an affair of the genitals.
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No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker.
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There is only one world the world pressing against you at this minute. There is only one minute in which you are alive this minute here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.
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A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself.
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... the truth is exactly that which can't be got into words. We are forced to lie, a little or, if we are inferior, much.
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The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.
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A minor symptom of wars is the cancerous growth of committees.
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I am never happier than when I am alone in a foreign city it is as if I had become invisible.
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