George Orwell, 4 essays

[fiefoe]

"Why I write"

• I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.
• I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous 'story' about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents... I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside.
• The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all... But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.
• to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information
• Good prose is like a windowpane.

"Can Socialists Be Happy?"

• Their happiness is convincing just because it is described as incomplete.
• the emptiness of the whole notion of an everlasting 'good time'
  
• They want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain, and the attempt to foresee it in detail merely confuses the issue.
• Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary.
  

__ The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman.
__ As a rule a bookshop is horribly cold in winter, because if it is too warm the windows get misted over, and a bookseller lives on his windows.

__ In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down.

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