Jb 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.

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 first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?

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.

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.

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

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

The famous younger generation who know it all

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.

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.

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.

The brain unoccupied seems to get up to some mischief of its own. I waded about in thought streams or what JB Priestley has called the skull cinema

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ... ?

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.