“Well, I wasn't going to abuse him. I was only going to ask: Is there any quality which distinguishes his work from that of twenty struggling writers one could name? Of course not. He's a clever, prolific man; so are they. But he began with money and friends; he came from Oxford into the thick of advertised people; his name was mentioned in print six times a week before he had written a dozen articles. This kind of thing will become the rule. Men won't succeed in literature that they may get into society, but will get into society that they may succeed in literature.”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“But just understand the difference between a man like Reardon and a man like me. He is the old type of unpractical artist; I am the literary man of 1882. He won't make concessions, or rather, he can't make them; he can't supply the market. I--well, you may say that at present, I do nothing; but that's a great mistake, I am learning my business. Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets; when one kind of goods begins to go off slackly, he is ready with something new and appetising. He knows perfectly all the possible sources of income. Whatever he has to sell, he'll get payment for it from all sorts of various quarters; none of your unpractical selling for a lump sum to a middleman who will make six distinct profits.”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“—Amy said that would be an imprudent expense; but as soon as he had got a good price for a book. Will not the publishers be kind? If they knew what happiness lurked in embryo within their foolish cheque-books!”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“Poverty will make the best people bad, if it gets hard enough. Why there’s so much of it in the world, I’m sure I can’t see.”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“The simple, sober truth has no chance whatever of being listened to, and it’s only by volume of shouting that the ear of the public is held. What”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“To the relatively poor (who are so much worse off than the poor absolutely) education is in most cases a mocking cruelty.”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“Refuge from despair is often found in the passion of self-pity and that spirit of obstinate resistance which it engenders. In”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“Dora kept her eyes down, and smiled ambiguously.”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“That of the British Museum Reading-room,’ explained Jasper; ‘known to some of us as the valley of the shadow of books. People who often work there necessarily get to know each other by sight. In the same way I knew Miss Yule’s father when I happened to pass him in the road yesterday.”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“A man who comes to be hanged,' pursued Jasper, impartially, 'has the satisfaction of knowing that he has brought society to its last resource. He is a man of such fatal importance that nothing will serve against him but the supreme effort of law. In a way, you know, that is success.' 'In”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“Poverty doesn’t allow of honourable feeling, any more than of compassion.”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“One doesn’t like to do brutal things if one can avoid them, you know.”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“The sum of their faults was their inability to earn money; but, indeed, that inability does not call for unmingled disdain.”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“He was in spring costume, and exhaled fresh odours. The”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“In passion, I can fling out violent words, but they don’t yet answer to my actual feeling. It will be long enough yet before I think contemptuously of you. You know that when a light is suddenly extinguished, the image of it still shows before your eyes. But at last comes the darkness.”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“Her womanhood went eagerly to meet him.”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“The unhoped was all but granted her. She could labour on in the valley of the shadow of books, for a ray of dazzling sunshine might at any moment strike into its musty gloom.”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“It was always in your power to rule me. What pained me worst, and hardened me against you, was that I saw you didn’t care to exert your influence. There was never a time when I could have resisted a word of yours spoken out of your love for me. But even then, I am afraid, you no longer loved me, and now —— ”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“Think of the very words “novel,” “romance” — what do they mean but exaggeration of one bit of life?”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“Mr Biffen,’ wrote another, ‘seems not to understand that a work of art must before everything else afford amusement.”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“The best moments of life are those when we contemplate beauty in the purely artistic spirit — objectively. I”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“Poverty can’t rob me of those memories. I have lived in an ideal world that was not deceitful, a world which seems to me, when I recall it, beyond the human sphere, bathed in diviner light.”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“Walker's a fool and Quarmby's an ass,' remarked her father.”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“I maintain that we people of brains are justified in supplying the mob with the food it likes. We”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“Flippancy, the most hopeless form of intellectual vice, was a characterising note of Mr Fadge’s periodical; his”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“Confound it! It's just because nobody does anything that things have come to this pass!”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“My mistake was that of numberless men nowadays. Because I was conscious of brains, I thought that the only place for me was London. It”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“The art of living is the art of compromise. We”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
“Well, Maud made a mistake, let us say. Dolomore is a clown, and now she knows it.”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
George Gissing
Born place: in Wakefield, Yorkshire, The United Kingdom
Born date November 23, 1857
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“It's hard not to feel humorless, as a woman and a feminist, to recognize misogyny in so many forms, some great and some small, and know you're not imagining things. It's hard to be told to lighten up because if you lighten up any more, you're going to float the fuck away. The problem is not that one of these things is happening; it's that they are all happening, concurrently and constantly.”
― Roxane Gay, quote from Bad Feminist
“Is all niceness then or is all buggery? How can a man be forty-five years old and still not know whether all is niceness or buggery? How does one know for sure?”
― Walker Percy, quote from Lancelot
“Comedy is a distortion of what is happening, and there will always be something happening.”
― Steve Martin, quote from Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
“It amazes me still to this day how quickly the empire fell to pieces. One day
the people are kissing the ground upon which the Tsar’s shadow has fallen, the
next they are hacking apart his body. Nikolai merely put down his scepter and
walked away, and literally overnight a three-hundred-year old dynasty
evaporated — poof, gone! — with no one lifting a finger to save it. Ironic
that the Soviet Union collapsed just as easily, which proves it was no better,
that the cure, kommunizm, was in fact far worse than the disease itself. Now,
I can only hope, those days are over, and just maybe that’s true. After all,
it took nearly one hundred years for the insanity to fade from France after
their revolution.”
― Robert Alexander, quote from The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar
“Your strength is the strength of stones. Suddenly,”
― Tananarive Due, quote from My Soul to Keep
Mockingbird
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The Reluctant Fundam...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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