Shooting an Elephant, George Orwell

I am enamoured by writers on writing.

Maybe this explains

pg. 4

(George Orwell's four great motives for writing)

1) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after your death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc. etc. It is humbug to pretend that this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen - in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition - in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sens of being individuals at all - and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong to this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.


pg. 149

Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you look back things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin. It is largely because of the books, films and reminiscences that have come between that the war of 1914-18 is now supposed to have had some tremendous, epic quality that the present lacks.

pg. 241

Indeed it is remarkable how Nature goes on existing unofficially, as it were, in the very heart of London... There must be some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds living inside the four-mie radius, and it is rather a pleasing thought that none of them pays a half-penny of rent.

... But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead at about the same moment. Suddenly, towards the end of March, the miracle happens and the decaying slum in which I live is transfigured. Down in the sqaure the sooty privets have turned bright green, the leaves are thickening on the chestnut trees, htet daffodils are out, the wallflowers are budding, the policeman's tunic looks positively a pleasant shade of blue, the fishmonger greets his customers with a smile, and even the sparrows are quite a different colour, having felt the balminess of the air and nerved themselves to take a bath, their frist since last September.

pg. 346

I have not enough animosity left to make me hope that Flip and Sambo are dead or that the sotry of the school being burnt down was true.

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Orwell is a very - opionated man, mured in his belief that people (he himself included) are hypocrites. Age certainly did not mellw his bitterness with humanity. He must have been trying - unpleasant - conflicted to live with. Extremely interesting to converse with.

Maybe his most successful story deals with animals in allegory, because his political views and cynicism is so - witty and unpalatable.