The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found? – J.B. Priestley
We cannot get grace from gadgets. In the Bakelite house of the future, the dishes may not break, but the heart can. Even a man with ten shower baths may find life flat, stale and unprofitable. – J.B. Priestley
California, that advance post of our civilization, with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life… its flavourless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried rooted in tradition and character. – J.B. Priestley
Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. – J.B. Priestley
It was one of those hot, silent nights, when people sit at windows, listening for the thunder which they know will shortly break; when they recall dismal tales of hurricanes and earthquakes; and of lonely travellers on open plains, and lonely ships at sea, struck by lightning. – Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, Chapter XLII
Look up at the miracle of the falling snow,—the air a dizzy maze of whirling, eddying flakes, noiselessly transforming the world, the exquisite crystals dropping in ditch and gutter, and disguising in the same suit of spotless livery all objects upon which they fall. – John Burroughs, “The Snow-Walkers,” 1866