The Winter of Our Discontent Quotes

“Readers seeking to identify the fictional people and places here described would do better to inspect their own communities and search their own hearts, for this book is about a large part of America today.”

“Men don’t get knocked out, or I mean they can fight back against big things. What kills them is erosion; they get nudged into failure. They get slowly scared. I’m scared.”

“Sometimes a man seems to reverse himself so you would say, ‘he can’t do that. It’s out of character’. Maybe it’s not. It could just be another angle, or it might be that the pressures above or below have changed his shape. You see it in war a lot - a coward turning a hero and a brave man crashing in flames.”

“Like most modern people, I don’t believe in prophecy or magic and then spend half my time practicing it.”

“A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. ”

“Any man of reasonable intelligence can make money if that’s what he wants. Mostly it’s women or clothes or admiration he really wants and they deflect him.”

“We can shoot rockets into space but we can’t cure anger or discontent.”

“I know three things will never be believed - the true, the probable, and the logical.”

“I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.”

“Misfortune is a fact of nature acceptable to women, especially when it falls on other women.”

“To be alive at all is to have scars.”

“Only God sees the sparrow fall, but even God doesn’t do anything about it.”

“Nobody changes. Nobody gets hurt.”

“In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.“

“So many old and lovely things are stored in the world’s attic because we don’t want them around us and we don’t dare throw them out.”

“You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.”

“Failure is a state of mind. It’s like one of those sand traps an ant lion digs. You keep sliding back. Takes one hell of a jump to get out of it.”

“You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.”

“When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you’ve got two new people. Maybe that means — hell, it’s complicated.”

“For the most part people are not curious except about themselves.“