J B Priestley Quotes

We don't live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. Good night.

I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.

Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.

We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison.

The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.

To say that these men paid their shillings 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.

The way to write a book is the application of the seat of one's pants to the seat of one's chair

But the point is, now, at this moment, or any moment, we're only cross-sections 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.

One of the delights beyond the grasp of youth is that of Not Going. Not to have an invitation for the dance, the party, the picnic, the excursion is to be diminished. To have an invitation and then not to be able to go -- oh cursed spite! Now I do not care the rottenest fig whether I receive an invitation or not. After years of illusion, I finally decided I was missing nothing by Not Going. I no longer care whether I am missing anything or not.

I was surrounded, and often enchanted, it appeared, by nothings.

She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.

No matter how piercing and appalling his insights, the desolation creeping over his outer world, the lurid lights and shadows of his inner world, the writer must live with hope, work in faith

Time's only a kind of dream, Kay. If it wasn't, it would have to destroy everything —the whole universe— and then remake it again every tenth of a second. But Time doesn't destroy anything. It merely moves us on —in this life— from one peephole to the next.

Time must be tracked down in the inner world ... It is one of the peculiarities of Time that it is intensely private and yet also widely shared.

There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age. I missed it coming and going.

It is no use speaking in soft, gentle tones if everyone else is shouting.

The happiest types I've ever known ran puppet shows - turning puppets into people. It works much better than turning people into puppets.

But after all it's better to ask for the earth than to take it.

When we are older we are able to live in - and make the best of - one continuing world, but when we are young we feel sometimes that in an unknown and sinister fashion the whole cosmos has been changed, one age ended and another begun when we were not noticing what was happening.

The English novelist J. B. Priestley once said that if he were an American, he would make the final test of whatever men chose to do in art, business, or politics a comparison with the Grand Canyon. He believed that whatever was false and ephemeral would be exposed for what it was when set against that mass of geology and light. Priestley was British, but he had placed his finger on an abiding American truth: the notion that the canyon stands as one of our most important touchstones—a kind of roofless tabernacle whose significance is both natural and national. It is our cathedral in the desert, and the word our is key because although the canyon belongs to the entire world, we, as Americans, belong particularly to it.

Nearly everything possible has been done to spoil this game: the heavy financial interests;... the absurd publicity given to every feature of it by the Press; ... but the fact remains that it is not yet spoilt, and it has gone out and conquered the world." J.B. Priestley in English Journey (referring to football), published in 1934.

But what is this clock, marking only so many years, that such men seem to consult in the dark of their being? We do not know. All we do know for certain is that no such clock, no such warnings, can come out of the passing time that we are told is all we have. They belong to a larger idea of Time, like all these dreams that came true.

Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries. J.B. PRIESTLEY

Clock time is our bank manager, tax collector, police inspector; this inner time is our wife. — J.B. Priestley, Man and Time

I have never met members of that House (of Commons) without feeling that they simply belong to a rather amusing, rowdy club in Westminster.

I don't play golf

Public men, Mr Birling, have responsibilities as well as privileges.

We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.

During dinner at the Dersinghams in "Angel Pavement"... "Do you ever watch rugger, Golspie?" Mr Dersingham demanded down the table. "What, rugby? Haven't see a match for years," replied Mr Golspie. "Prefer the other kind when I do watch one." Major Trape raised his eyebrows, "What, you a soccah man? Not this professional stuff? Don't tell me you like that." "What's the matter with it?" "Oh, come now! I mean, you can't possibly --I mean it's a dirty business, selling fellahs for money and so on, very unsporting.

What appears to be definite and precise does not belong to any acceptable reality. It is only the experiences, the queer previsions, the fleeting premonitions, that are real. Vague and insubstantial though they may appear to be, compared with anything else in the mists and shifting lights of Time theory, they loom up like mountains of iron ore.

Both the fanatical believers and the fixed attitude people are loud in their scorn of what they call “woolly minds.”… [But it] is the woolly mind that combines scepticism about everything with credulity about everything. Being woolly it has no hard edges. It is easy, pliant, yet it has its own toughness. Because it bends, it does not break. … The woolly mind realizes that we live in an unimaginable gigantic, complicated, mysterious universe. To try to stuff the vast bewildering creation into a few neat pigeon-holes is absurd. We don’t know enough, and to pretend we do is mere intellectual conceit. … The best we can do is keep looking out for clues, for anything that will light us a step or two in the dark.

I don't dislike life the way you seem to do. But then you may be a fish out of water. I'm not. I'm where I want to be, doing what I want to do. But even so, there's nothing wonderful about it. Most of the time it's like - let's say - living with a lion. One day you can make it jump through hoops, or even ride on its back. But get careless, make a wrong move, and it'll have you in a corner and be tearing an arm off.

Although it was over 50 years ago, I have not forgotten the moment when, after exploring the maze of Indian metaphysics, I reached its central Thought. I read that if we go deeper and deeper into the self we can arrive at last at the recognition of Atman, the essential self; and that if we go deeper into the not-self, the world that seems so solid and real, pulling aside veil after veil of illusion, we shall find Brahman, the ultimate reality; and that Atman and Brahman are identical.

A grey tide, engulfing all colour and shape of things that had been or were to be, rushed across his mind, sweeping the life out of everything and leaving him all hollow inside. Once again he sat benumbed in a shadow show. Yet as ever—and this was the cruel stroke—there was something left, left to see that all the lights were being quenched, left to cry out with a tiny crazed voice in the grey wastes. This was what mattered, this was the worst, and black nights and storms and floods and crumbling hills were not to be compared with this treachery from within. It wasn’t panic nor despair, he told himself, that made so many fellows commit suicide; it was this recurring mood, draining the colour out of life and stuffing one’s mouth with ashes. One crashing bullet and there wasn’t even anything left to remember what had come and gone, to cry in the mind’s dark hollow; life could then cheat as it liked, for it did not matter; you had won the last poor trick. Having conjured the malady into a phrase or two, Penderel felt better, came out of his reverie and looked about for entertainment.

I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning. —J. B. Priestley

Miss Matfield was now busy rummaging in her handbag, and all she said was “Curse!” rather like a villain in an old-fashioned melodrama. It is only these strictly modern young ladies, who live their own life by pounding a typewriter all day and then retiring to tiny bed-sitting rooms in clubs, these beings who are supposed to be the inheritors of the earth, who can afford to talk like villains in old-fashioned melodramas.

I used to hear an awful lot of vague talk about the temptations of a poor girl’s life in London. Where do they come in? Nobody ever tempts me. The only temptations I have are to steal some of my worthy employeress’s terribly expensive bath salts when I’m allowed to enter her bathroom to wash my hands, and – there must be something else – yes, not to give the bus conductor my penny when he doesn’t ask for it. What chance have I then to be really virtuous or to be wicked either?

You went to Bundle’s to eat meat. The kitchen turned out acceptable soups, vegetables, puddings, tarts, savouries, and the like, but all these were as nothing compared with the meat. The place was a vegetarian’s nightmare. It seemed to be perpetually celebrating the victory of some medieval baron.

Living in an age of advertisement we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day but it changes and withers at the touch.

They forget, these protesters, that both cities and the Sabbath were made for man. If the social arrangements do not fit in with the time-old desires of ordinary decent human nature, it is the social arrangements that should be changed.

Poate că dacă aș fi ajuns la Viena, Roma sau Paris as fi găsit întrebuințare acolo, cum știu multe limbi și am destule cunoștințe în diferite domenii de activitate, putând face multe. Dar probabil că aș fi silit să iau o atitudine contra țării, să fiu speaker sau redactor al propagandei americane, ceea ce nu-mi convine pentru că niciodată nu am fost în slujba nici unui stat, nu cred în imperialism, deci nu pot fi sluga acelora care le susțin. Dar eu știu că există altă America și alt Occident, cu valori artistice și culturale în care cred și despre care se poate scrie din ce mai puțin scrie la noi. Asta mă doare. Trăim într-o epocă de luptă crâncenă și definitivă, în care sunt puse în joc viitoarele forme și experimente de organizare ale societății mondiale, comuniste sau capitaliste. Sperăm într-o împăcare, în sensul că americanii vor renunța la capitalismul acerb, trecând la un fel de socio-democrație mai echitabilă, iar rușii îmblânzindu-și atitudinile față de artă și cultură, lăsând joc liber individualismului în noua organizare colectivistă a lumii. Un fel de socialism cu respectul drepturilor spirituale ale individului, cam cum il vede J. B. Priestley. Dar acum lucrurile acestea nu sunt posibile. Trebuie să fim sau cu unii, sau cu alții. Cum nu plec și nici nu am încercat să plec sau să mă gândesc la plecarea din țară, cum deci ramân aici, va trebui să mă adaptez realitățile din partea aceasta a lumii, pe care nu o iubesc in totul. Nu mă supără colectivizarea economică și egalizarea socială, dimpotrivă. Dar, Doamne, de ce e nevoie pentru realizarea acestora de brutalitate în relațiile între oameni, de prigonirea artei, științei, culturii, de un conformism dogmatic? Ei nu înțeleg sau nu vor să înțeleagă că așa cum matematicile nu sunt marxiste si nici capitaliste, arta mare e dincolo de social, chiar dacă și conținutul e important si trebuie să exprime omenia. Humanismul meu e aproape de teorile celor de stânga, dar nu identic, mai ales în practica actuală.

People are beginning to believe that government is a mysterious process with which they have no real concern. This is the soil in which autocracies flourish and liberty dies. Alongside that apathetic majority there will soon be a minority that is tired of seeing nothing vital happen and that will adopt any cause that promises decisive action. There are signs of this about already. If that majority does not waken up, it may find, too late, that it has taken, too many good things in English life for granted.

—all that damned stupid greedy selfishness that’s starting all over again. I tell you, the minute the real danger passed, and people felt safe again, out it came. Nothing’s happened to them inside. They haven’t changed. They haven’t learnt anything—except how to make bigger and better bombs and hate like hell.

Well, it’s something I never felt before I joined up,” he said, returning to his slow careful manner. “But coming back this time, I’ve felt it all right. [Farming] seems to cut you off too much. After a time, if you don’t look out, you don’t seem to care what’s happening to other people. You aren’t part of anything. You’re out for yourself – and just your family. Mind you, it’s easy to feel like that – because you have to work hard and it takes nearly all your time—and you don’t meet many people who are doing different jobs, the way you do in towns. But it’s not right somehow. It shouldn’t be like that. We’ve had enough of that.

Without knowing this, without having been to the future, there would be no way to situate this vision among the other items in my memory. And since most of our thoughts are as evanescent and hard to remember as dreams, I will be unlikely to remember this vision or notice how it corresponded to an actual event in my life some time afterward. It has often been suggested that déjà vu experiences may reflect this kind of “memory of a premonition,” although neural signals of familiarity may misfire for more mundane reasons, so it would be hard to substantiate such a claim in many, or most, cases. It is the same difficulty that J. B. Priestley identified in the context of his future-influencing-present effect: How often will it occur to people to (a) record their passing thoughts and moods in detail and (b) compare those recorded thoughts and moods to later events? Almost never. Yet as we will see later, when people’s lives, thoughts, and feelings are recorded for some other purpose, such as in psychotherapy, it sometimes does—quite by accident—reveal suggestive evidence for something like the existence of a perturbing influence of future events on prior behavior. “The brain is an illusion factory,” as neurobiologist Dean Buonomano puts it.52 Humans’ ability to vividly and realistically imagine things that haven’t happened (or haven’t happened yet) poses a huge challenge to studying anomalous experiences and ESP phenomena. One of the million functions of the Swiss Army Knife in our skulls is to serve as a powerful all-purpose imaging device, a special effects studio that would put Industrial Light and Magic to shame. It is able to create from scratch, instantly, vivid images to dramatize any piece of information or idea, real or fictitious, as well as translate complex thoughts instantly into pictures. It does this not only in dreams but also in the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states on the edge of sleep, and even in waking reality when we “mentally time travel” or daydream or imagine possible scenarios.

The trouble is that we can’t trust life, and in order to keep going with it at all, we have to be for ever watching it and patching it up.

This is J. B. Priestley's 1945 play An Inspector Calls, and the message it contains - that we do not live alone, that we live in a society where we bear a collective responsibility towards each other - is one of the most important literary calls to activism that teenagers will encounter.

Nowadays, it is true, we have mass media and expert propaganda to spread suspicion and fear. But the people I mean—and they form the great majority—are not suspicious and fearful, as many educated and more influential persons are. Propaganda has not made them accept the Bomb. We protesters, though we may have won over some of their sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, have not made them reject it. They remain profoundly, astonishingly, shockingly indifferent.

ALAN: (…) Lo que realmente somos es la longitud total de nosotros mismos, nuestro entero tiempo, y cuando llegamos al fin de esta vida, todos esos seres, todo nuestro tiempo serán nosotros… el verdadero tú, el verdadero yo (…). KAY: (…) Olvidar que el tiempo no está devorando nuestras vidas… destrozando, arruinándolo todo… para siempre… ALAN: No, todo está muy bien, Kay. Te buscaré ese libro. (Va hacia la puerta, pero se vuelve). Sabes, me parece que gran parte de nuestra preocupación nace de que consideramos al tiempo como el devorador de nuestras vidas. Por eso nos precipitamos los unos sobre los otros, y nos lastimamos mutuamente. KAY: Como una escena de pánico en un barco que se hunde. ALAN: Sí, exactamente así. KAY (sonriéndole): Pero tú no haces esas cosas… ¡Tú eres tan bueno! ALAN: Pienso que es más fácil no hacerlas, una vez que se ha adoptado un punto de vista más ámplio. KAY: ¿Como si fueramos seres… inmortales? ALAN (sonriendo): Sí, y lanzados a una magnífica aventura.

We may be under fifty different national flags, but we are compelled to serve now under only one economic flag.

He talked in a quick staccato manner, so eager to have his say that he often interrupted himself.

Here at his elbow was really another world; and it was soft, warm, and breathing, a person, somebody you could talk and laugh and cry with, not so very different in most things, indeed strangely like you.

Gin is saddening," Penderel admitted, "but it's not so saddening as no gin.

People wonder what's the matter with the world these days. They forget that all the best fellows, the men who'd have been in their prime now, who'd have been giving us a lead in everything, are dead [in the Great War]. If you could bring 'em all back... hundreds and hundreds of thousands of 'em, you'd soon see the difference they'd make in the place. But they're dead, and a lot of people, very different sort of people, are alive and kicking.

I'm trying to make myself remember every single line of your face. And I know I shan't. Very soon I shall try to see it again, and there'll be nothing but a blur while hundreds of faces that mean nothing will come between us. It's a hard world for love, Oliver. Even the memory of its face won't stay to comfort us.

If men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.

moments make up our lives ... if we are shaping a self that will survive death in some form or other, then our existence in passing time, moment by moment, does not become less important but more important

This looking at life properly, with no nonsense about you, and becoming a level-headed fellow, might be compared to attendance at a rather strange movie theatre. In there you are told to concentrate entirely upon the images shown on the screen. These are your world, your life. What is not shown on the screen ... is nothing. But you cannot help feeling that there is perhaps something else, not on the screen. Perhaps you hear a voice that is not coming from there and is much closer to your ear ... There are whispers and movements in the dark. Apparently there is a life all around you, not like the clear and ordinary imagery of the screen - a life fragmentary, mysterious, only to be guessed at, but somehow suggesting a fullness and richness of living not to be found in the existence of the lighted images. Indeed, this screen existence is beginning to seem repetitive and tedious; but one of its hollow-brass voices ... says that you have only to wait, taking care not to addle your wits with nothings ... But if you listen hard, another voice ... so close that it might be inside your head, whispers that what you are being told with such authority and complacency is nonsense, that the life around you in front of the screen is real and enduring, and that your nothings have always been SOMETHING.

what if Time is not as simple as most people now imagine it to be? ... Suppose we are sentenced not to death, to sleep and forgetting, but to life ... ?

I’m terribly sorry, but I really don’t see how I can help you.’ It was the sort of line that if uttered in a play by J. B. Priestley would lead to the host getting up to heave on the bell-pull prior to the butler showing the detective his way out and his place in society.

Drinks at medium prices are generally served under the brightest lights, but the very cheapest and the most ruinously expensive both prefer to exist in a dim and shuttered atmosphere.

The nearest watch-tower, at which the driver pointed, was sharply silhouetted. It was closer than the other had been and had no higher hills behind it, only the clearing sky with its suggestion of of pale gold, now perhaps employed in the propaganda services of the people’s free republic. All the fences, designed to keep those people feeling free and happy without a chance of break-out, could be seen from this vantage point. It was as if the landscape was now within the brain of some giant power lunatic, with barbed and electrified wire running towards nerve ends, watch-towers completing the optical system.

It's still the same rotten story whether it's been told to a police inspector or to somebody else." -Eric Birling

He moved and the bed immediately gave a groan. (Everything in the room creaked and groaned and constantly complained. It was tired of people, that little room.)

..faced with one of those dark spouting mornings which burst over unhappy London like gigantic bombs filled with dirty water. At the first sign of the approach of one of these outrages, all clocks ought to be put back three hours, so that everybody might stay in bed until their fury is spent.

But the point is, now, at this moment, or 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.

With our busy lives, for most of us, relaxation is not a priority. When to do nothing.” I ask people in yoga classes what they do to relax, a common answer is our —J. B. Priestley contemporary types of “relaxation”—watching TV, competitive and spectator sports events, walking, reading, and so on.

But these girls aren't cheap labour - they're people.

You'll hear some people say that war is inevitable. And to that I say - fiddlesticks!

Goole. G. double O-L-E

England, even now, is still the country of local government, local politics, strong local interests, and only the newspaper written and published in the immediate neighbourhood can deal adequately with such government, politics, and interests.

The famous younger generation who know it all