Paul Fussell
Paul Fussell was an American literary historian, military historian, and literary critic born on March 22, 1924, in Pasadena, California.
Fussell was educated at Pasadena City College, Pomona College, and Harvard University. He worked as a university teacher and produced writing that crossed disciplinary lines, engaging philology, literary criticism, cultural commentary, and journalism. He was awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star Medal, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in support of his research. His work earned him a National Book Award, a National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, the Athenaeum Literary Award, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, and the Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Fussell died on May 23, 2012, in Medford. His writings returned to two persistent territories: scholarly work on eighteenth-century English literature, approached with the precision of a trained scholar of English and philologist, and commentary on America's class system, examined with the directness of a literary critic and cultural observer.
Quotes by Paul Fussell
Paul Fussell's insights on:
Happy are those who can relieve suffering with prayer Happy those who can rely on God to see them through. They can wait patiently for the end. But we who have put our faith in the goodness of man and now see man’s image debas’d lower than the wolf or the hog – Where can we turn for consolation? Owen.
If I didn’t have writing, I’d be running down the street hurling grenades in people’s faces.
Understanding the past requires pretending that you don’t know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.
I would read accounts of so-called battles I had been in, and they had no relation whatever to what had happened. So I began to perceive that anything written was fiction to various degrees. The whole subject – the difference between actuality and representation – was an interesting one. And that’s what brought me to literature in the first place.
Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and it’s fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment.
Two motives urge fans to obsession with their sports. One is the need- – through the appeal of vicarious success – -to identify with winners. The other is to sanction, through pedantry, dogmatism, record-keeping, wise secret knowledge, and pseudo-scholarship, a claim to expertise on the subject. Sports give every man his opportunity to perform as a learned bore and to watch innumerable commentators on TV do the same.
Most people who seek attention and regard by announcing that they’re writing a novel are actually so devoid of narrative talent that they can’t hold the attention of a dinner table for thirty seconds, even with a dirty joke.
All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveller learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.