Jan Morris
Jan Morris
Jan Morris, CBE, FRSLis a Welsh transgender historian, author and travel writer. She is known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy, a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong, and New York City...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNon-Fiction Author
Date of Birth2 October 1926
country hate past
The language itself, whether you speak it or not, whether you love it or hate it, is like some bewitchment or seduction from the past, drifting across the country down the centuries, subtly affecting the nations sensibilities even when its meaning is forgotten.
writing ideas factual
I resist the idea that travel writing has got to be factual.
mystic
Indians love to reduce the prosaic to the mystic.
fun moving home
I know well the delectable thrill of moving into a new house somewhere altogether else, in somebody else’s county, where the climate is different, the food is different, the light is different, where the mundane preoccupations of life at home don’t seem to apply and it is even fun to go shopping.
country australia expectations
Australia is a country not so much of fulfillment as of theatrical expectation.
jobs tired cities
The city bursts with ideas as with traffic, a swirl of newness and surprise. Who can be bored in a city? If you are tired of one activity you can try something else, change your job, take your custom to another restaurant.
self citizens deodorant
[Travel seems] not just a way of having a good time, but something that every self-respecting citizen ought to undertake, like a high-fiber diet, say, or a deodorant.
spiritual believe sexuality
I believe the transsexual urge, at least as I have experienced it, to be far more than a social compulsion, but biological, imaginative, and essentially spiritual, too.
mind quality asia
Kashmir has always been more than a mere place. It has the quality of an experience, or a state of mind, or perhaps an ideal.
hands oysters cities
Venice is a cheek-by-jowl, back-of-the-hand, under-the-counter, higgledy-piggledy, anecdotal city, and she is rich in piquant wrinkled things, like an assortment of bric-a-brac in the house of a wayward connoisseur, or parasites on an oyster-shell.
light soul shade
To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music.
future learned
I told him everything and it was from him that I learned what my future would be.
economics flickering language last manage remove seldom street
The language of economics is seldom limpid, but in H Street they usually manage to remove from it the very last flickering colophon of charm.
anthem fact national pride vital wonderful
I think it is vital that we know the national anthem because we, as Americans, should take pride in the fact that we live in such a wonderful country.