Storm Jameson Quotes

giving the utmost of herself to three absorbing interests [marriage, motherhood, career] ... was a problem for a superwoman, and a job for a superwoman, and only some such fabled being could have accomplished it with success.

Lord, if there is a heartache Vienna cannot cure I hope never to feel it. I came home cured of everything except Vienna.

The only way to live is to accept each minute as an unrepeatable miracle, which is exactly what it is: a miracle and unrepeatable.

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present. Most of us spend fifty-nine minutes an hour living in the past, with regret for lost joys or shame for things badly done (both utterly useless and weakening) or in a future which we either long for or dread. . . . 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. Which is exactly what it is-a miracle and unrepeatable.

Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.

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.

Surprise will be my last emotion, not fear.

Sadistic literature is not only inhumane. It is anti-human.

For what I have received may the Lord make me truly thankful. And more truly for what I have not received.

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present.

Hope is a talent like any other.

War, for any cause, is inexcusable. There is nothing which excuses us for the beastly ingenuity of our wars. Only fools, only the diseased, think that we are served by killing the strong young men with machines.

All pornography is to a degree sadistic - inevitably.

You can't argue with a raging want. You can, but it is useless.

What I do not know and cannot even hope to understand before I die is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other ... What nerve has atrophied in the torturer, or worse is sensually moved?

She did not so much cook as assassinate food.

Nationalism will keep its venom until we succeed in creating an image of the nations of the whole world as so many provinces.

to grow old is to have taken away, one by one, all gifts of life, the food and wine, the music and the company. ... the gods unloose, one by one, the mortal fingers that cling to the edge of the table.

Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are - gentleness, memory, and habit.

The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.

An animal is not cruel; it lives wholly in the instant leap on its prey, in the present taste of marrow or blood. Cruelty begins with the memory, and the pleasures of the memory are impure; they draw their strength along levels where no sun has reached.

Women will always put persons above ideas ... and so they'll always be defeated. Persons die, and ideas rule the world.

There is only one world the world pressing against you this minute.

There is a stage in any misery when the victim begins to find a deep satisfaction in it.

The young are so much more vulnerable than the old - the stuff is still warm and malleable, it takes impressions.

Speaking the truth, once you have started it, is too exhilarating to draw back.

The impossible talked of is less impossible from the moment words are laid to it.

Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow.

If we are to survive on this planet, there must be compromises.

Very rare, the intelligence of the heart. The intelligence of the whimsical brain is less rare, less attaching, sometimes tedious.

... 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.

The strangest thing about life is not its frightful cruelty, but that it can be gentle.

I am never happier than when I am alone in a foreign city; it is as if I had become invisible.

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.

Truth is the only good and the purest pity. ... Men lie for profit or for pity. All lies turn to poison, but a lie that is told for pity or shame breeds such a host of ills that no power on earth can compass their redemption.

In what touches their social convictions, most persons do not think. The threat of change, with all it suggests to them in the loss of social and economic privilege, alarms so deeply that they are incapable of unprejudiced thought. They seem to themselves to be thinking, with lucidity and fairness, but since they start from the conviction that change must undoubtedly be for the worse or from settled grief at the thought of losing what is old and lovely, they are doing no more than following a logical sequence of ideas from a false premise.

One of the uncovenanted benefits of living for a long time is that, having so many more dead than living friends, death can appear as a step backwards into the joyous past.

Not literature alone, but society itself is wormed and rotten when language ceases to be respected not merely by advertisers and politicians, but by persons of learning and authority.

I do not think about absent persons as often or with such intense longing as I think of places. They lie one below the other in my mind.

In my firm, we dealt in lies. Advertising is that ... the skilful use of the truth to mislead, to spoil, to debase.

... we do not remember people as they were. What we remember is the effect they had on us then, but we remember it through an emotion charged with all that has since happened to us.

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.

Failures to love are irremediable and irredeemable.

Language is memory and metaphor.

Think of all the really successful men and women you know. Do you know a single one who didn't learn very young the trick of calling attention to himself in the right quarters?

A minor symptom of wars is the cancerous growth of committees.

If you think with enough energy about a hoped-for event, it will in the end happen. Not because you willed it. Because it was all the time in your nature.

The older I grow the more sharply I mistrust words. So few of them have any meaning left. It is impossible to write one sentence in which every word has the bareness and hardness of bones, the reality of the skeleton.

There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification.

Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions.