I read this book during a time when I was going through a rough personal hell. I was broke, homeless, and in relationship purgatory. At that point in my life, I wasn’t looking for inspiration. I didn’t need a comeback story or a magical lesson on how to fix my current situation. But this book spoke to me on a different level. Orwell understood that poverty isn’t just financial — there is a psychological aspect to it. What stayed with me from this book is the humanity—the message of survival, and endurance. It’s all about getting up, finding food, finding shelter, finding a reason to keep moving even when the horizon looks bleak.
Because of all that, this are my favorite quotes from Down and Out Between Paris and London:
- The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their income and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.
- He had managed to keep his brain intact and alert, and so nothing be ragged and cold, or even starving, but so long as he could read, think and watch for meteors, he was, as he said, free in his own mind.
- But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor.
- I had no sensation of poverty, for even after paying my rent and setting aside enough for tobacco and journeys and my food on Sundays, I still had four francs a day for drinks, and four francs was wealth.
- He lives in a rhythm between work and sleep, without time to think, hardly conscious of the exterior world; his Paris has shrunk to the hotel, the metro, a few bistros and his bed.
- We were not splendid inhabitants of a splendid world.
- If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, ‘I’m a free man in here’-he tapped his forehead-“and you’re all right”
- He had lived on this filthy imitation of food till his own mind and body were compounded of inferior stuff. It was malnutrition and not any native vice that destroyed his manhood.
- He had a curious theory about this. Life on earth, he said, is harsh because the planet is poor in the necessities of existence.
- The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start, and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind.
- It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.
“George Orwell”
Rod Rioja 