Hitch 22: A Memoir Quotes
"There is always a moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in…" - Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory
"Something I owe to the soil that grew—More to the life that fed—But most to Allah who gave me two Separate sides to my head." - Rudyard Kipling: Kim
"I am standing on a ferry-boat that is crossing a lovely harbor."
"The island withstood one of the longest Turkish sieges in the history of 'Christendom.'"
"If you happen to attend a Maltese Catholic church during Mass, you will see the priest raising the Communion Host and calling on 'Allah,' because this after all is the local word for 'god.'"
"I didn’t call her by this name at the time, but 'Yvonne' is the echo with which I most piercingly and yearningly recall her memory to me."
"By this period, however, our family had left Malta and been posted to the much more austere surroundings of Rosyth, another naval base on the east coast of Scotland."
"I think Malta may have been a sort of high point for Yvonne: all British people were a cut above the rest in a semicolony and there was that club for cocktails and even the chance of some local 'help.'"
"This was the laid-back early 1970s and I had neither the wish nor the ability to be 'judgmental.' Yvonne was the only member of my family with whom I could discuss sex and love in any case."
"He had once been an ordained minister of the Church of England (at the famous church of St.-Martin-in-the-Fields, off Trafalgar Square, as I later discovered) but had seen through organized religion."
"The English army had just won the war." - The Beatles: Sergeant Pepper: "A Day in the Life"
"A N ANCIENT PIECE of Judaic commentary holds that the liver is the organ that best represents the relationship between parents and child: it is the heaviest of all the viscera and accordingly the most appropriate bit of one’s guts."
"He loved me tenderly and shyly from a distance, and later on took a naïve pride in seeing my name in print." - Arthur Koestler: Arrow in the Blue
"The Gulf Stream is beginning to weaken."
"If the woman is watering Nigel’s bloody gin, then I’m not surprised that he’s always in a filthy temper."
"The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not."
"If the People had indeed let down the Party... then the Party might have to dissolve the People and elect a new one."
"I hope never to lose the access to outrage that I felt then."
"If my parents knew what really went on at the school, I used to think... they would faint from the shock."
"I was among the last generation to go through the 'old school' version of Englishness."
"The ability to run such a 'system' is among the greatest pleasures of arbitrary authority."
"Contradiction is what keeps sanity in place."
"One had heard of his legendary success with women (all of it gallant and consensual, unlike that of some other masters of the platform)."
"It’s relatively easy to see why people want to exert power over others, but what fascinated me was the way in which the victims colluded in the business."
"The only rule of thumb was: whatever is not compulsory is forbidden."
"The only reason for mentioning free speech in the first place was that, however one looked at it, we had in fact shut down a public debate by force."
"However, in more advanced Europe the impulses of a revolutionary Left could and should be used to erode the Berlin Wall from both sides."
"Once you have been told that you can’t leave a place, its attractions may be many but its charm will instantly be void."
"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."
"But the guards—as I now thought of them—pointed emphatically back up the trail to the camp."
"I use the words 'double life' without any shame."
"It’s trite to say that each generation rebels, and I’d already had the chance to get bored with the late-’50s image of a 'rebel without a cause.'"
"I knew that this would please James, who had first been introduced to Auden and Kallman through some mutual friends in Florence, but I also knew it wouldn’t go to his head."
"I shan’t easily forget the reply I received from a very sweet if slightly slow-spoken Communist Party official."
"I had never seen or smelled Fleet Street or Bloomsbury before, and these totemic names took on life and shape as the luxurious day drew on and became a misty autumnal one."
"I considered myself to be miles to the 'left' of it, of course, but still in awe of the review on which I had cut my teeth as a schoolboy."
"The lore had it that if you donned this totemic Macintosh and ventured out in it, you would make a conquest of the very first woman you met."
"To be invited back to this famous office in Great Turnstile after lunch and to climb that stairway to Thwaite’s aerie was an uncovenanted bonus."
"To exit the building onto Lincoln’s Inn Fields clutching a couple of review copies of my own—'We might like you to take a look at these for us': Surely there had been a misunderstanding?"
"I was trying to recruit James to the International Socialists at the time, and so when he murmured something about how eye-opening a movie it was, I readily and militantly challenged him with a 'what are you doing about it?'"
"In one room was an old hatstand draped with an ancient raincoat said to have belonged to H.G. Wells."
"There, I mentally bid farewell to Oxford and to the provinces in general."
"This was the district that stretched from the Marx Memorial Library on Clerkenwell Green to the British Museum Reading Room where the old boy had done his best work."
"In these and other purlieus was manufactured the journalistic small-arms ammunition that was to be hurled against the gigantic (but inaccurate and poorly commanded) batteries of Fleet Street’s Tory newspaper establishment."
"Once again, it was a lunch at All Souls that supplied the answer."
"My desire at that stage was to make a sufficient living at the business of Grub Street 'hackery'—the refreshing term that the English use for the scribbling trade—so as to be able to toil more nobly in the evenings and weekends."
"It was becoming reasonably obvious, however, that I wasn’t going to be one of them."
"I would go on the basis of looks alone."
"The Europa Hotel in Belfast was for me the first of many journalistic resorts."
"First, adopt the profession of journalism that allowed one to become a version of John Bunyan’s 'Mr. Facing-Both-Ways.'"
"I would do my day jobs at various mainstream papers and magazines and TV stations, where my title was 'Christopher Hitchens.'"
"My tolerance for alcohol was very much greater than my father’s had been, greater indeed than anyone I seemed to run into."
"I can remember it all very well: Ackroyd doing his best to be a good host."
"I wasn’t stupid enough not to realize that he wouldn’t have asked that question if he didn’t already know the answer to it."
"In places like this, in contrast to the rather dreary precincts of the British urban and suburban and rural mainland, there was drama to be had, and for the asking."
"The power of this parasitic class was what protracted the fighting in Northern Ireland for years and years after it had become obvious to all that nobody (except the racketeers) could 'win.'"
"The whole timbre of his voice altered, and to the interviewer’s first question on Ugandan Asian immigration he returned a rasping, sneering answer that summoned all the old echoes of race and nation."
"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."
"The resulting work is not beautiful (I winced with recognition when I first read the expression 'British teeth' in Gore Vidal’s Judgment of Paris) but it is nonetheless real and tangible and available as a kind of right, and a hard-won right at that."
"And Webster winked, too—a wholehearted, roguish wink that said, as plainly as if he had spoken the words: 'How long has this been going on?'"
"I was sufficiently furious, after the British Army massacre of demonstrators on Bloody Sunday, that I once shocked Fenton very much by saying that, if an IRA man were to be on the run and needing no more than a bed for the night and not a word spoken, I myself might be ready to furnish the needful."
"One is unlikely to forget the first time that one sees violent death, or feels it graze one’s own sleeve."
"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."
"And this now makes me old enough to remember a time when the BBC tried to exclude subversive and resentful types."
"I eventually came to appreciate a feature of the situation that has since helped me to understand similar obduracy in Lebanon, Gaza, Cyprus, and several other spots."
"He never raised his voice, surveyed the world in a very level and almost affectless fashion through moon-shaped granny glasses, wore his hair in a fringe, was rail-thin, showed an interest in what Martin used to call 'hippyish' pursuits."
"In one way, this reeked of Mailer’s showbiz reluctance to lose a country that supplied him with such good copy. But I thought I could detect the pulse of patriotic sympathy in him, too, if only because I also felt it latently in myself."
"I felt the stirrings and yearnings of another civil rights movement, triggered by an earlier one that still had some distance to run."
"The balance between the macro and the micro, the heroic scale and the human scale, has never since ceased to fascinate and charm me."
"In the streets and avenues of this amazing city, there was barely a crew-cut to be seen, and everybody’s trousers—if they wore any trousers—seemed equal to the task of covering the ankle if not indeed the entire shoe."
"I had no faith in precognitive dreams or any patience for 'dream' rhetoric in general, yet Manhattan was exactly as I had hoped it would be."
"Sometimes an expectation or a wish does come true."
"This new American postwar atmosphere was a direct challenge to one’s sense of security."
"I had to survive some very discouraging first impressions: the airport café where I ate my first breakfast was a nothingness of plastic and formica."
"The first was the extraordinary hospitality. Balliol College had equipped me with a list of former alumni who were willing to 'put me up' and this comprised some fairly solid citizens all across the USA."
"I deliberately did not vote to keep Labour in office. I had various private excuses... But in truth, I secretly knew quite well that I wasn’t merely registering an abstention."
"But it didn’t work so well in Salt Lake City, say, where Balliol men and Trotskyists alike were as rare as rocking-horse droppings."
"I joined the picket line on a very spirited strike, set to start at midnight, against the General Motors plant at Fremont."
"I never asked them, for example, what life and culture were like in Ohio or Rhode Island or California, and they never seemed interested in saying."
"It was a bit much even for Commander Hitchens, who privately thought the islands slightly absurd and probably undefendable."
"There was a metaphor ready to hand in my native Hampshire. Until some time after the war, the squirrels of England had been red."
"I thought I could detect the pulse of patriotic sympathy in him, too, if only because I also felt it latently in myself."
"The miasma of the dictatorship pervaded absolutely everything, not excluding the aperitifs and the main course."
"Whether this thought has lengthened or shortened my life I shall never know, but it has certainly colored it."
"For many of these brave gentlemen, segregated in their U.S. Army units, England was the first picture they ever saw of how a non-segregated society might look."
"In my hometown of Portsmouth there was a riot in 1943, with the locals scorning attempts by American military policemen to enforce a color bar in the pubs."
"If there was one thing of which my Argentine experience had convinced me, it was that for all its hackery and cynicism, the profession of journalism did still have its aspect of nobility."
"It didn’t cause me any trouble to become an Italian, but my becoming an American is my own work."
"The American who has known Europe much can never again see his country with the single eye of his ante-European days."
"All I needed was a sponsor, either at a magazine or newspaper or publishing house."
"I was overwhelmed by how many people were willing to give me the time of day."
"Life in Britain had seemed like one long antechamber to a room that had too many barriers to entry; here in the USA it seemed to be true that if you dared to give things 'your best shot' then the other much-used phrases like 'land of opportunity' would kick in as well."
"It sometimes seemed as if my attempts at nuanced response were falling a trifle flat."
"Journalism was a state of mind: it wasn’t the sort of thing that could be taught, or in which one could get an academic qualification."
"The biggest and most passionate of the side arguments, I still remember, was between those who still thought it had been OK to vote for Gene McCarthy over Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and those who thought that this leftist self-indulgence had held open the door for Richard Nixon and his goons."
"His ensuing book The File is a well-controlled masterpiece of frigid outrage at America’s betrayal of a loyal citizen."
"I didn’t have the heft to get a lawyer who would help me overstay my student visa and fight for a work permit."
"I celebrated as if I’d defeated a personal enemy."
"In the countries I was beginning to visit as a reporter—Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus, later Chile—it was often American power that in the last resort guaranteed the forces of reaction."
"The colossal expense of this military-industrial system was also a theft from the world’s poor."