J.B. Priestley: Quotes about life

J.B. Priestley was English writer. Explore interesting quotes on life.

J.B. Priestley: 70 quotes0 likes

“Living in age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.”

"The Disillusioned", in The Balconinny, and Other Essays ([1929] 1969) p. 30.

“Remember what we once were and what we thought we'd be. And now this. And it's all we have, Allan, it's us. Every step we've taken -- every tick of the clock -- making everything worse. If this is all life is, what's the use? Better to die, like carol, before you find it out, before Time gets to work on you. I've felt it before, Allan, but never as I've done tonight. There's a great devil in the universe, and we call it Time.”

J.B. Priestley Time and the Conways

Time and the Conways, p. 59-60.

“But the point is, now, at this moment, or at any moment, we're only a cross-section of our real selves. What we really are is the whole stretch of ourselves, all our time, and when we come to the end of this life, all those selves, all our time, will be us -- the real you, the real me. And then perhaps we'll find ourselves in another time, which is only another kind of dream.”

J.B. Priestley Time and the Conways

Time and the Conways, p. 60.

“I suppose -- in the last resort -- you trust life -- or you don't. Well -- I don't. There's something malicious... corrupt... cruel... at the heart of it. We don't belong. We're a mistake.”

J.B. Priestley I Have Been Here Before

I Have Been Here Before, Act II.

“I have lived longer than you. I have thought more, and I have suffered more. And I tell you there is more truth to the fundamental nature of things in the most foolish fairy tales than there is in any of your complaints against life.”

J.B. Priestley I Have Been Here Before

I Have Been Here Before, Act III.

“In our secret depths, wherever we do our unspoken wishing, either we want life to be tidy, clear, fully understood, contained within definite limits, or we long for it to seem larger, wilder, stranger. Faced with some odd incident, either we wish to cut it down or to build it up.
On this level, below that of philosophies and rational opinions, either we reject or ignore the unknown, the apparently inexplicable, the marvellous and miraculous, or we welcome every sign of them. At one extreme is a narrow intolerant bigotry, snarling at anything outside the accepted world-picture, and at the other is an idiotic credulity, the prey of any glib charlatan. At one end the world becomes a prison, at the other a madhouse.”

Source: Man and Time (1964), Ch. 8, p. 183

“Cathedral cities, market towns, ports forgotten by the sea, spas long out of fashion, all these can decay beautifully, and often their charm increases as the life ebbs out of them. Industrial towns, like steam-engines, are only even tolerable if they are in working order and puffing away.”

Bk 2, Ch. 6. ii
The Good Companions (1929)

“We know only too well that there are times when everything goes wrong, but, in our haste to make the worst of life, we are apt to forget that there are also times when everything goes right.”

Source: Faraway (1932), Ch. 5. 5