Fussell Quotes & Sayings

Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of judgement. — Paul Fussell

When the Allies bombed the Italians on the island of Pantelleria in June, 1943, General Spaatz, of the United States Air Corps, concluded that bombing can reduce to the point of surrender any first-class nation now in existence, within six months. — Paul Fussell

To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason. — Paul Fussell

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. — Paul Fussell

The worst thing about war was the sitting around and wondering what you were doing morally. — Paul Fussell

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. — Paul Fussell

If the guidebook used to be critical, today it seems largely a celebratory adjunct to the publicity operations of hotels, resorts, and even countries. — Paul Fussell

Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it. — Paul Fussell

If the term discussion has always seemed to me to imply mild warnings of wasted time, workshop sets off a clangorous alarm. — Paul Fussell

The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be. — Paul Fussell

Another reason is that the letters are almost always funny, offering readers the spectacle of some pompous self-celebrator given ample ironic room in which to parade his self-solicited hurt. — Paul Fussell

I would read accounts of so-called battles I had been in, and they had no relation whatever to what had happened. So I began to perceive that anything written was fiction to various degrees. The whole subject
the difference between actuality and representation
was an interesting one. And that's what brought me to literature in the first place. — Paul Fussell

I find nothing more depressing than optimism. — Paul Fussell

The balls used in top class games are generally smaller than those used in others. — Paul Fussell

war historian Paul Fussell suggests that in World War II heavy drinking was the answer to fear, boredom and the terrible damage to the sense of identity experienced by so many combatants. Drunkenness, he writes, did for the men of this war what drugs did for the next generation in Vietnam. — Liz Byrski

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. — Paul Fussell

I became a bodybuilder as a means of becoming a caricature. The inflated cartoon I became relieved me from the responsibility of being human. But once I'd become that caricature, that inflated cartoon, I longed for something else. As painful and humiliating it is to be human, being subhuman or superhuman is far worse. — Samuel Wilson Fussell

If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable. — Paul Fussell

The day after the British entered the war Henry James wrote a friend:
The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness ... is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words. — Paul Fussell

Sensei says funerals are not really for the dead. They are for those left behind. "The dead are long gone by the time a funeral is held," he told us. "Who would wait when the doors of Heaven are open? Only the living would be foolish enough to still hang around on earth. — Sandy Fussell

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. — Paul Fussell

I remember reading Paul Fussell my first year teaching at U of Hawai'i and being like, oh, it has a turn! Why didn't anyone tell me? — Juliana Spahr

Life is all about balance. Since I have only one leg, I understand that well. — Sandy Fussell

Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice. — Paul Fussell

Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war. — Paul Fussell

Anyone telling about his travels must be a liar, ... for if a traveler doesn't visit his narrative with the spirit and techniques of fiction, no one will want to hear it. — Paul Fussell

Irony is the attendant of hope and the fuel of hope is innocence. — Paul Fussell

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. — Paul Fussell

Things without defense: insects, kittens, small boys. — Paul Fussell

A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class. — Paul Fussell

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. — Paul Fussell

What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism; all else is publicity. — Paul Fussell

The rat scuttles, the big cat creeps, the monkey dashes,
The bat glides, the white crane soars, the lizard darts,
And the owl hoots
In the middle of the night. — Sandy Fussell

There is no Apocalypse. — Paul Fussell

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. — Paul Fussell

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. — Paul Fussell

A hug from a samurai girl is warmer than a heap of blankets and more meaningful than a pile of words. — Sandy Fussell

If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces. — Paul Fussell

On a recent HBO special, Roseanne Arnold, who, incidentally, collects Barbies, excoriated what she considered to be Barbie's middle-class-ness. Why didn't Mattel make, say, "trailer-park Barbie"? But to many upper-middle-class women, all post-1977 Barbies are Trailer Park Barbie. Ironically, given the knee-jerk antagonism to Barbie's body, it is one of her few attributes that doesn't scream "prole." Her thinness - indicative of an expensive gym membership and possibly a personal trainer - definitely codes her as middle- or upper-middle-class. In Distinction, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu notes that "working class women . . . are less aware of the 'market' value of beauty and less inclined to invest . . . sacrifices and money in cultivating their bodies." Likewise, Barbie's swanlike neck elevates her status. A stumpy neck is a lower-class attribute, Fussell says. — M.G. Lord

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. — Paul Fussell

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

And so we find Fussell living alone in a flat unfurnished except for an exercise machine and 'A cardboard cut-out of Arnold with loin cloth and sword as Conan the Barbarian'. Thus the heterosexual bodybuilder's relationship to homosexuality is revealed as a sad kind of insubstantial shadow of it, a kind of mourning, a ghostly kind of love. — Mark Simpson

For me, I took the exact right path. The cranky, independent one. And I've never looked back on it with anything but joy. — Betty Fussell

The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower your class.
— Paul Fussell

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

If truth is the main casualty in war, ambiguity is another. — Paul Fussell

Travel sharpens the senses. Abroad one feels, sees and hears things in an abnormal way. — Paul Fussell

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. — Paul Fussell

Kyoko sniffs, unable to speak. Sometimes saying nothing means most of all. — Sandy Fussell

Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government. They learn, if they are lucky, humility. — Paul Fussell

Anybody who notices unpleasant facts in the have-a-nice-day world we live in is going to be designated a curmudgeon. — Paul Fussell

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. — Paul Fussell

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

Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way. — Paul Fussell

People are always afraid of anything different. They are afraid of change," says Sensai. "It is the same everywhere. — Sandy Fussell

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. — Paul Fussell

And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach. — Paul Fussell