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J. B. Priestley

59 quotes

“Those no-sooner-have-I-touched-the-pillow people are past my comprehension. There is something suspiciously bovine about them.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) first seen 1928 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Dark Hours", in Too Many People, and Other Reflections (1928).
“I suppose -- in the last resort -- you trust life -- or you don't. Well -- I don't. There's something malicious . . . corrupt . . . cruel . . . at the heart of it. We don't belong. We're a mistake.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have lived longer than you. I have thought more, and I have suffered more. And I tell you there is more truth to the fundamental nature of things in the most foolish fairy tales than there is in any of your complaints against life.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Remember what we once were and what we thought we'd be. And now this. And it's all we have, Allan, it's us. Every step we've taken -- every tick of the clock -- making everything worse. If this is all life is, what's the use? Better to die, like carol, before you find it out, before Time gets to work on you. I've felt it before, Allan, but never as I've done tonight. There's a great devil in the universe, and we call it Time.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But the point is, now, at this moment, or at any moment, we're only a cross-section of our real selves. What we really are is the whole stretch of ourselves, all our time, and when we come to the end of this life, all those selves, all our time, will be us -- the real you, the real me. And then perhaps we'll find ourselves in another time, which is only another kind of dream.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Living in age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Disillusioned", in The Balconinny, and Other Essays ([1929] 1969) p. 30.
“It's silly for young men to announce themselves as new types of humanity. . .and then give you nothing but stale communism. Old H.G. Wells has more new ideas than the lot of them.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) first seen 1933 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Hugh Walpole (21 April 1933). Quoted in Roger Fagge, The Vision of J.B. Priestley. London: Bloomsbury Academic (2013), (p. 9).
“I wished I had been born early enough to have been called a Little Englander. It was a term of sneering abuse, but I should be delighted to accept it as a description of myself. That little sounds the right note of affection. It is little England I love.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: English Journey (1934). Reprinted in Judy Giles and Tim Middleton Writing Englishness: An Introductory Sourcebook,Routledge, 2003 (p. 26).
“It should be realised that men will take enormous risks rather than be bored. War has been used before now to prevent a bored populace from getting into mischief, at the expense of its rulers.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Public and the Idea of Peace", in Challenge to Death, edited by Storm Jameson, E. P. Dutton & Company, Incorporated (1935).
“Shaw presumes that his friend Stalin has everything under control. Well, Stalin may have made special arrangements to see that Shaw comes to no harm, but the rest of us in Western Europe do not feel quite so sure of our fate, especially those of us who do not share Shaw's curious admiration for dictators.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The War - And After", in Horizon magazine (January 1940), reprinted in Andrew Sinclair (ed.) War Decade: An Anthology of the 1940s (1989)
“Our great-grand-children, when they learn how we began this war by snatching glory out of defeat, and then swept on to victory, may also learn how the little holiday steamers made an excursion to hell and came back glorious.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Postscript to the News", broadcast on BBC Radio (5 June 1940); published in The Listener (13 June 1940).
“We cannot go forward and build up this new world order, and this is our war aim, unless we begin to think differently...one must stop thinking in terms of property and power and begin thinking in terms of community and creation. Property is the old-fashioned way of thinking of a country as a thing, and a collection of things in that thing, all owned by certain people and constituting property; instead of thinking of a country as the home of a living society with the community itself as the first test.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: BBC Radio Broadcast (21 July 1940). Reprinted in Postscripts, William Heinemann Limited (1940), and All England Listened: The Wartime Broadcasts of J.B. Priestley, Chilmark Press (1968).
“We English certainly do not like working for work's sake. There is nothing inside us that cries to be set going at an early hour and kept at it until a late hour. We have no private passion for being industrious.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) first seen 1949 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: New Statesman, August 27 1949. Quoted in E. S. Turner, Roads to Ruin : The Shocking History of Social Reform, Michael Joseph, London, 1950 (pg. 66).
“Although we talk so much about coincidence we do not really believe in it. In our heart of hearts we think better of the universe, we are secretly convinced that it is not such a slipshod, haphazard affair, that everything in it has meaning.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Coincidence," Going Up Stories and Sketches (1950).
“The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Thoughts in the Wilderness (London: William Heinemann, 1957), p. 201.
“In plain words; now that Britain has told the world she has the H-Bomb, she should announce as early as possible that she has done with it, that she proposes to reject, in all circumstances, nuclear warfare. This is not pacifism. There is no suggestion here of abandoning the immediate defence of this island . . . No, what should be abandoned is the idea of deterrence-by-threat-of-retaliation. There is no real security in it, no decency in it, no faith, hope, nor charity in it.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Britain and the Nuclear Bombs", The New Statesman (2 November 1957). This article led to the creation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
“No matter what is willed by consciousness, that which belongs to the depths can only be restored in the depths: the numinous lies outside the power of collectives, cannot be subject to state decree, created by a resolution at an international conference, offered to all shareholders and employees by the board of Standard Oil or General Motors.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Literature and Western Man (Harper, 1960).
“I can't help feeling wary when I hear anything said about the masses. First you take their faces from 'em by calling 'em the masses and then you accuse 'em of not having any faces.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Saturn Over the Water (1961) ch. 2.
“It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The New Statesman (20 July 1962), p. 7.
“In spite of recent jazzed-up one-day matches, cricket to be fully appreciated demands leisure, some sunny warm days and an understanding of its finer points.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The English (1973).
“Most writers enjoy two periods of happiness – when a glorious idea comes to mind and, secondly, when a last page has been written and you haven’t had time to know how much better it ought to be.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: International Herald Tribune (3 January 1978).
“To say that these men paid their shilling to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A man can afford to let himself go in a hen-house.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She seemed to have had a sudden terrible glimpse of life as it really was, and was ready to weep at the thought of its strange dusty littleness.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By the time they reached the hall, they were not so much friends as fellow-conspirators, for Youth, when it is exiled into the kingdoms of the old, at once turns itself into the strongest of secret societies.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mrs Bevison-Burr, the commanding woman, came next. Her subject was Unbelief. She referred to Unbelief as if it were a very obnoxious person who was in the habit of insulting her every morning and evening. Mrs Bevison-Burr commanded them to do all manner of things to Unbelief.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cathedral cities, market towns, ports forgotten by the sea, spas long out of fashion, all these can decay beautifully, and often their charm increases as the life ebbs out of them. Industrial towns, like steam-engines, are only even tolerable if they are in working order and puffing away.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In this place, whether we call it Bruddersford or Pittford Falls, perfection is not to be found, neither in men nor in the lot they are offered, to say nothing of the tales we tell of them, these hints and guesses, words in the air and gesticulating shadows, these stumbling chronicles of a dream of life.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He was quite capable of talking just as men talk in bad stories in popular magazines, and Miss Matfield had sometimes wondered whether it was because he had read a great many bad stories or because the stories were nearer the truth than one thought and were worked up, on the fringes of Empire, out of men like Major Ansdell.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Your mother knows no more about organization than a — a prize rabbit.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She examined his face in that special detached way that all women seem to have at times, looking at your face as if it was not part of you, but something you were showing them, like a picture or a piece of china. Then she nodded wisely at it.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Y]ou've got to put up a show of being tough nowadays, especially if you're a girl, or else they'd all be walking over you with nailed boots. They do that anyhow, in the long run, if you're a woman.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We know only too well that there are times when everything goes wrong, but, in our haste to make the worst of life, we are apt to forget that there are also times when everything goes right.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was some unknown reality, into which the mind retreated at these moments of smiling detachment, and from the standpoint of this unknown reality it seemed as if this real life, as we call it, was no more than a dream, only a few shades more solid and consistent than the dreams of the night.[…] What was this other and deeper reality? You never looked about in it, you only looked out of it, to smile at the tissue-paper drama of ordinary reality.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But then we assume on our paper that nobody thinks. Which is all right. But where we're wrong—and of course I'm not really including myself but mean the top boys—is in thinking that our readers, dumb as they are, take us seriously.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've been up and down and round about," said the Commodore, "and I've seen a lot of religions at work. And I don't like them. With all due respect, padre. As a matter of fact I'm not thinking about the Church of England, which is something different, something intended to keep the English decent and fairly comfortable and not likely to go tearing off into religion and making nuisances of themselves—”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“… It's funny about England," he continued thoughtfully. "Once you're outside London, you seem to meet all kinds of people you never expect to meet, people you can't imagine meeting just from reading about England in the papers or most of the books. Not only odd characters but people who seem to belong to other periods. You never imagine, when you live a long way off, that all the other Englands—Victorian and Edwardian, for instance—still survive in certain people.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In spite of its size and range, this is […] a personal essay. It is a Time-haunted man addressing himself chiefly to all those people he knows from experience to be also Time-haunted.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The appalling difficulty of examining the Time problem seems to me to be chiefly due to the fact that Time either changes into something else or quietly disappears from the examination room. Trying to keep it fixedly in view is like playing Wonderland croquet.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[P]ursuing Time, we are like a knight on a quest, condemned to wander through innumerable forests, bewildered and baffled, because the magic beast he is looking for is the horse he is riding.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fifty years ago I seemed to myself older than other people assumed me to be; now I seem younger.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If what we are all trying to do is to describe reality, an intuitive interpretation of actual experience, however loose the terms it employs, may bring us closer to it than the most rigorous linguistics and the severest logic. These last may leave so little room to manœuvre that they cannot capture any experience outside an accepted narrow pattern; and indeed they may operate (for philosophers do not live in a vacuum) to insist upon that pattern and to deny everything outside it.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I […] thoroughly detest [novels that] fasten on to some historical figure, offering me bogus biography, an unpleasant mixture of fact and fiction.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fully to appreciate a play we have to maintain a delicate balance between what is taking place apparently on two different levels of the mind. On one level we are involved in the drama, are living imaginatively with its characters. On the other level we are enjoying a performance by actors on a stage, being fully aware that we are in a theatre.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the same way, the dramatist has a double task, creating the imaginary life of his characters and at the same time writing for a certain number of players on a certain kind of stage. It is this mixture of sheer creation and a highly skilled technique that makes playwriting difficult. Even in plays considered worth a production, nine times out of 10 there is an obvious deficiency on one side or the other.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have pointed out already how ideas seep down to wider and commoner levels of intelligence and feeling until at last they are believed to be solid realities. It is precisely the 'hard-headed and realistic' who all too often exist in cages made out of largely discredited hypotheses. They serve prison sentences behind walls and doors they only imagine are there.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The very newspapers that celebrate the latest conquest in their largest print also keep asking us what is the matter with Woman nowadays, when she has so much she never had before. The answer is that she is tired of having to live with neurotic, immature conquerors.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]f self-deception has to be risked anyhow, it might be better to risk it to take a broad view than a narrow view. It may be foolish, perhaps even dangerous, to wander too far from the highway and then be the dupe of fantasies; but it may be even more foolish, even more dangerous in the end, to be so determined to keep to the well-tested road that you wear blinkers, see nothing of the surrounding landscape, and find the road itself, all that you can see, more and more wearisome and detestable.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Science can function only by abstracting from the reality in which the scientist has his being. In spite of the astonishing complications it discovers, with which it dazzles and almost blinds us, science is compelled by its own terms of reference to be a drastic simplification.”
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source