Coming Up for Air

world we’re going down into, the kind of hate-world, sloganworld. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep.

feeling that you’ve got to be everlastingly fighting and hustling, that you’ll never get anything unless you grab it from somebody else, that there’s always somebody after your job, the next month or the month after they’ll be reducing staff and it’s you that’ll get the bird—THAT, I swear, didn’t exist in the old life before the war.

There’s time for everything except the things worth doing.

Sometimes when you come out of a train of thought you feel as if you were coming up from deep water, but this time it was the other way about, it was as though it was back in 1900 that I’d been breathing real air.

Houses going up into the air, bloomers soaked with blood, canary singing on above the corpses.

Do you notice how often they have under-sized men for these bullying jobs?

I went downstairs in a bad temper and ready to make myself disagreeable

Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.

e. But it's one of the advantages of being fat that you can fit into almost any society