30 Quotes by Richard Aldington

Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else - above all, a travel bureau - arrange everything before-hand?

But if I'm useless only because I haven't been properly educated, is that my fault?

There shall be no more gods; there shall be no more quiet and holy places of the earth; and the sea shall be filled with our dirty works. Your women shall breed like sows, and you shall work like robots. You shall value nothing for its own sake, but only for its market value. As for living, the machines will do that for you. In the morning you shall say, Would God it evening; and in the evening, Would God it were morning.

Just now I was thinking that I'd died and had to come to life again, had to build up a life myself. Only the new edifice has to be built with the ruins of the old. Or rather, I feel like a tree that has been blasted level with the ground, with only the roots still living. Some even of the roots are dead, some I have to kill, the rest have to grow again somehow.

The casualty lists went on appearing for a long time after the Armistice - last spasms of Europe's severed arteries.

The only news he wanted to hear was thatpeople had become a little sensible and decent and peace-ful; he disliked this Cup-Tie attitude, in which peopletook sides for the sake of excitement, and rooted fortheir team to win without any sense of responsibility.This passion for vicarious belligerence! Obviouslyneither of them really believed that anything unpleasantwould happen to them, and the bogey of being stoned bystrikers was only evoked for the sake of a little uncostlyexcitement.

Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on his own dunghill.

I began to write what I called 'rhythms' ie unrhymed pieces with no formal metrical scheme where the rhythm was created by a kind if inner chant..Later I was told I was writing 'free verse' or Vers libre.

Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility.