“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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“I can’t think of anybody…who knows the sum and substance of what I know and feel and cry about in my secret self all the time when I don’t feel strong, the sorrows of time and personality, and can therefore on all levels make it all the way with me”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Visions of Cody
“Good evening, Lord Corwin,' said the lean, cadaverous figure who rested against a storage rack, smoking his pipe, grinning around it.
Good evening, Roger. How are things in the nether world?'
A rat, a bat, a spider. Nothing much else astir. Peaceful.'
You enjoy this duty?'
He nodded.
I am writing a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity. I work on those parts down here.”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from The Hand of Oberon
“What, after all this time, is the purpose of mass schooling supposed to be? Reading, writing, and arithmetic can’t be the answer, because properly approached those things take less than a hundred hours to transmit — and we have abundant evidence that each is readily self-taught in the right setting and time. Why, then, are we locking kids up in an involuntary network with strangers for twelve years? Surely not so a few of them can get rich? Even if it worked that way, and I doubt that it does, why wouldn’t any sane community look on such an education as positively wrong? It divides and classifies people, demanding that they compulsively compete with each other, and publicly labels the losers by literally de-grading them, identifying them as “low-class” material. And the bottom line for the winners is that they can buy more stuff! I don’t believe that anyone who thinks about that feels comfortable with such a silly conclusion. I can’t help feeling that if we could only answer the question of what it is that we want from these kids we lock up, we would suddenly see where we took a wrong turn. I have enough faith in American imagination and resourcefulness to believe that at that point we’d come up with a better way — in fact, a whole supermarket of better ways.”
― John Taylor Gatto, quote from Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Education
“The secret of my success is this: I never tell what I am going to do till I have done it.”62”
― quote from Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt
“Relationships were never equivalent: that was why it was so hard to find permanent ones. When two people depended on each other, they each had their own reasons. Sometimes the reasons balanced each other out temporarily, and the two of you were suspended gently in air. Then inevitably, one side came crashing down.”
― Nell Freudenberger, quote from The Dissident
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