Jonathan Meades > Quotes

“The two Mast Houses just within the Victory Gate of Portsmouth Dockyard are raised above the water on piloti. They are structures of remarkable grace, clinker-built, painted the palest green. They are vast, as they needed to be. Their survival is an industrial site devoted for a century to the servicing of mastless vessels is a matter for celebration. The use of which the more southerly is put is a matter for obloquy: the Mary Rose Shop is a repository of tawdry, insipid tat. It's the sort of stuff to make me wince- a dismal, timid inventory of mediocrity. Bad taste is forgivable. It's no taste which is so disheartening.”
― Jonathan Meades, Museum Without Walls

“Even when broaching the most familiar subjects – especially when broaching the most familiar subjects – we have always to be looking to illumine them in ways that make them seem unfamiliar, fresh, in ways that make us believe we have not seen them before.”
― Jonathan Meades, Museum Without Walls

“Régis Jauffret got it right when he said that he was disgusted by writers who think of their readers.”
― Jonathan Meades, Museum Without Walls

“signify an intention that I should become any more”
― Jonathan Meades, An Encyclopaedia of Myself

“The notion of severality of function is, regrettably, one that was gradually abandoned throughout the twentieth century because it did not accord with modernism’s puritanical espousal of ‘honesty’.”
― Jonathan Meades, Museum Without Walls

“ritual heightens grief, makes it momentous, enforces concentration on its object who is yet gone for so short a time that it is unimaginable that he will not come back – the conviction of death’s certainty is founded on prolonged exposure to absence rather than on the presence of the meat in the coffin or on bearing witness to the agent (physical or chemical, alien or quisling, sudden or chronic) of that immeasurable change.”
― Jonathan Meades, Pompey: A Novel

“Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch. Orson Welles”
― Jonathan Meades, The Plagiarist in the Kitchen: A Lifetime's Culinary Thefts

“The apocalyptic dystopias dreamed up by anti-urbanists were peopled by seething masses welded into the terrible organism of the mob, which is also a standard-issue subject of expressionism.”
― Jonathan Meades, Museum Without Walls