Home > Work > Hitch 22: A Memoir

Hitch 22: A Memoir QUOTES

Hitch 22: A Memoir QUOTES

161 " Getting my breath back and managing a brief statement in my cut-glass Oxford tones, I was abruptly recognized as nonthreatening, brusquely advised to fuck off, and off I duly and promptly fucked. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir

162 " As Bertie Wooster once phrased it, they experienced some difficulty in detecting the bluebird. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir

163 " the awareness that the distinction between “over here” and “over there,” or between “home” and “abroad” is often a false one has never left me. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir

164 " Kierkegaard so shrewdly observes, one is condemned to live it forward and review it backward. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir

165 " (Today I want to puke when I hear the word “radical” applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world.) "

― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir

166 " The important but delayed realization will have to come: Israeli Jews are a part of the diaspora, not a group that has escaped from it. Why else does Israel daily beseech the often-flourishing Jews of other lands, urging them to help the most endangered Jews of all: the ones who rule Palestine by force of arms? Why else, having supposedly escaped from the need to rely on Gentile goodwill, has Israel come to depend more and more upon it? On this reckoning, Zionism must constitute one of the greatest potential non sequiturs in human history. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir

167 " It is not only true that the test of knowledge is an acute and cultivated awareness of how little one knows (as Socrates knew so well), it is true that the unbounded areas and fields of one’s ignorance are now expanding in such a way, and at such a velocity, as to make the contemplation of them almost fantastically beautiful. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir

168 " It kindled in me a resolution which I have tried to keep ever since: to spend at least once every year a little time in a country less fortunate than my own. (If "

― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir

169 " The most intense wars are civil wars, just as the most vivid and rending personal conflicts are internal ones, and what I hope to do now is give some idea of what it is like to fight on two fronts at once, to try and keep opposing ideas alive in the same mind, even occasionally to show two faces at the same time. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir

170 " The antagonistic exponents of freedom and absolutism must thus meet at last and then will be fought the mighty battle on which the world will look with breathless interest; for on its issue the freedom or the slavery of the world will depend. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir

171 " During all this I never quite lost the surreal sense that I had become in some way a pro-government dissident and that of all the paradoxes of my little life this might have to register as the most acute one. ... "For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir

172 " Evelyn Waugh was in error when he said that in New York there was a neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistook for energy. There was, rather, a tensile excitement in that air which made one think — made me think for many years — that time spent asleep in New York was somehow time wasted. Whether this thought has lengthened or shortened my life I shall never know, but it has certainly colored it. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir

173 " But the Seventies were only the Seventies because they had to have a name. Nullity and anticlimax appeared to close in on all sides. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir

174 " In the weirdly beautiful landscapes along the Irish border, most especially in Derry with its haunting evening light along the Waterside and the old walls, and in rainy Belfast with its nineteenth-century slums and yet its permanent view of the lovely surrounding hills, I saw my first “war” without even needing a passport to travel to it. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir

175 " Lovers often invest their first meetings with retrospective significance, as if to try and conjure the elements of the numinous out of the stubborn witness of the everyday. I "

― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir

176 " I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on - only henceforth in my absence. Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir

177 " Friends, somebody said, are “god’s apology for relations.” I "

― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir

178 " Hegel said that history was the story of freedom becoming conscious of itself. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir

179 " There are many ways of dating the moment when the Left lost or—I would prefer to say—discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir

180 " Soon all humane people would understand the need for a revolution from below, where those who worked and struggled and produced would be the ruling class. Those with eyes to see could detect this with ease, while those whose eyes had yet to be opened could always… well, it was thought that events would also assist in persuading them. I realize that this may sound slightly as if I had joined a cult. There actually was a rival Trotskyist group, later to make itself notorious by recruiting Corin and Vanessa Redgrave, whose depraved “leader” Gerry Healy did in fact teach us all we needed to learn about cultism and the mental and sexual and financial exploitation of the young and the credulous. (I learned a lot about “faith-based” movements from this early instruction.) But the “I.S.,” as our group was known, had a relaxed and humorous internal life and also a quizzical and critical attitude to the “Sixties” mindset. We didn’t grow our hair too long, because we wanted to mingle with the workers at the factory gate and on the housing estates. We didn’t “do” drugs, which we regarded as a pathetic, weak-minded escapism almost as contemptible as religion (as well as a bad habit which could expose us to a “plant” from the police). Rock and roll and sex were OK. Looking back, I still think we picked the right options. "

― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir