Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by James Fenton

Quote by James Fenton

“The Ideal This is where I came from. I passed this way. This should not be shameful Or hard to say. A self is a self. It is not a screen. A person should respect What he has been. This is my past Which I shall not discard. This is the ideal. This is hard.”

Quote by James Fenton

Create image

Author

James Fenton
James Fenton

James Fenton, a renowned British poet, was born on April 25, 1949. His poetry is widely acclaimed for its unique style and profound emotional expression. more

You May Also Like

“If Gissing is less compassionately observant than Mrs Gaskell, less overtly polemical than Kingsley, still The Nether World and Demos would be sympathetically endorsed by either of them, or by their typical readers. Yet Gissing does introduce an important new element, and one that remains significant. He has often been called ‘the spokesman of despair,’ and this is true in both meanings of the phrase. Like Kingsley and Mrs Gaskell, he writes to describe the true conditions of the poor, and to protest against those brute forces of society which fill with wreck the abysses of the nether world. Yet he is also the spokesman of another kind of despair: the despair born of social and political disillusion. In this he is a figure exactly like Orwell in our own day, and for much the same reason. Whether one calls this honesty or not will depend on experience.”

PoliticsDespairDisillusionmentLiterary CriticismGeorge OrwellGeorge Gissing
Author:Raymond Williams
Create image

“I walked back to the window to look down at the people who shared this city with me. The people who made every day a series of mediocrities. The unreformed murderers masquerading as businessmen in borrowed suits and debt-laden cars. The voluptuous bimbos floating around in an inexplicable mix of vacuity and despair. The crumbling face of my building looked pretty enough from across the street, but from here I could see how worn it was. I peeled off a satisfying chunk of paint, cement and matter. And I let it fall to the street below.”

DespairDecayNumbness
Author:Nasri Atallah
Create image

“Visions and voices and fear and despair cannot be captured by CT scan or measured in the amplitude of EKG waves. Try as we might, we simply cannot predict which of our patients will kill themselves, which will murder their children, and which will leave the hospital healed, never to return.”

FearDespairPsychiatry
Book:Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis
Create image