Emotions and Feelings

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened —that, surely was more terrifying than mere torture and death?

[T. S. Eliot achieves] the difficult feat of making modern life out to be worse than it is.

Afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.

For my own part I don’t object to old jokes—indeed, I reverence them. When sea-sickness and adultery have ceased to be funny, western civilization will have ceased to exist.

The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.

The heart is an organ of fire.

The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.

I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President I must put the interests of America first. . . . Therefore, I shall resign the presidency, effective at noon tomorrow.

[ Quoting a sign held up by a young girl on the campaign trail :] Bring us together again.

What America needs most today is what it once had, but has lost: the lift of a driving dream.

What America needs most today is what it once had, but has lost: the lift of a driving dream.

Electric flesh-arrows . . . traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eye-lids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm.

At the center of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the blond beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory.

What can largely be achieved by punishment, in man or beast, is the increase of fear, the intensification of intelligence, the mastering of desires: punishment tames man in this way but does not make him “better”—we would be more justified in asserting the opposite.

In dreams we all resemble this savage.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travellers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.”

Never mind the bottle, as long as it gets you drunk.

In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.

In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.

Passion, whether violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of exciting disgust, and . . . music, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear.

I like to enjoy myself, but rest assured that I can be as serious as anyone else can.

124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.