Paul Fussell Famous Quotes
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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.
If truth is the main casualty in war, ambiguity is another.
Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant 'paying off of old scores'; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances.
Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government. They learn, if they are lucky, humility.
A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, but more selectively. A travel book, in its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply.
The middles cleave to euphemisms not just because they're an aid in avoiding facts. They like them also because they assist their social yearnings towards pomposity. This is possible because most euphemisms permit the speaker to multiply syllables, and the middle class confuses sheer numerousness with weight and value.
The worst thing about war was the sitting around and wondering what you were doing morally.
The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask to
be imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified.
When ... asked what I am writing, I have answered, "A book about social class in America," ... It is if I had said, "I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.
If the guidebook used to be critical, today it seems largely a celebratory adjunct to the publicity operations of hotels, resorts, and even countries.
Today the Somme is a peaceful but sullen place, unforgetting and unforgiving ... To wander now over the fields destined to extrude their rusty metal fragments for centuries is to appreciate in the most intimate way the permanent reverberations of July, 1916. When the air is damp you can smell rusted iron everywhere, even though you see only wheat and barley.
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.
If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.
Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way.
Things without defense: insects, kittens, small boys.
In war it is not just the weak soldiers, or the sensitive ones, or the highly imaginative or cowardly ones, who will break down. Inevitably, all will break down if in combat long enough […] As medical observers have reported, "There is no such thing as 'getting used to combat' … Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their experience." Thus – and this is unequivocal: 'Psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare.
The implicit optimism of the [field service post card] is worth noting - the way it offers no provision for transmitting news like "I have lost my left leg" or "I have been admitted into hospital wounded and do not expect to recover." Because it provided no way of saying "I am going up the line again," its users had to improvise. Wilfred Owen had an understanding with his mother that when he used a double line to cross out "I am being sent down to the base," he meant he was at the front again. Close to brilliant is the way the post card allows one to admit to no state of health between being "quite" well, on the one hand, and, on the other, being so sick that one is in hospital.
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.
What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism; all else is publicity.
There is no Apocalypse.
Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.
Irony is the attendant of hope and the fuel of hope is innocence.
A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.
Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.
And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach.
The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and conscience.
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.
I find nothing more depressing than optimism.
