20 quotes
Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course — but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless.
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
Beggars do not work, it is said; but then, what is work?
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
This thought cheered Bozo, I do not know why. He was a very exceptional man.
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
The most bitter insult one can offer to a Londoner is "bastard" — which, taken for what it means, is hardly an insult at all.
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
How sweet the air does smell — even the air of a back-street in the suburbs — after the shut-in, subfaecal stench of the spike!
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum.
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future.
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
One always abandons something in retreat. Look at Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his whole army.
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
He had two subjects of conversation, the shame and come-down of being a tramp, and the best way of getting a free meal.
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve.
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though all one's blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted.
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
"Ah, the poverty, the shortness the disappointment of human joy! For in reality car en realite, what is the duration of the supreme moment of love? It is nothing, an instant, a second perhaps. A second of ecstasy, and after that- dust, ashes, nothingness."
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people — people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from normal standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words.
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
Looking round that filthy room, with raw meat lying among the refuse on the floor, and cold, clotted saucepans sprawling everywhere, and the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used to wonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world as bad as ours. But the other three all said they had been in dirtier places.
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)