The Purdzilla Show

  Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash

Photo by Anthony DELANOIX on Unsplash London is a city of consumers, of people who are deeply civilised, but not primarily useful. George Orwell (in an essay on Dickens. To be fair - G.O. was discussing why Dickens didn't write about agriculture)

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash Patriotism is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same. It is the bridge between the future and the past. George Orwell (from The Lion and The Unicorn 1941)

Photo by Didier Weemaels on Unsplash The rule of money sees to it that we shall be governed largely by the old - that is, by people utterly unable to grasp what age they are living in or what enemy they are fighting.  George Orwell (in his essay The Lion and The Unicorn 1941)

I don't know what poetry is or what it's supposed to do. I imagine it has a kind of nervous effect on some people like music has on others. George Orwell (in Coming Up For Air )

Photo by Chandler Cruttenden on Unsplash Whatever thought you think there's always a million people thinking it at the same moment. But that was how I felt. We're all on the burning deck and nobody knows it except me. I looked at the dumb-bell faces streaming past. Like turkeys in November, I thought. Not a notion of what's coming to them. It was as if I'd got X-rays in my eyes and could see the skeletons walking. George Orwell (in Coming Up For Air )

The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually in the past. George Orwell (in Coming Up For Air )