Jan Morris Quotes (1926-2020)

“I liked these men very much when I first met them on the mountain nearly a half-century ago, but I came to admire them far more in the years that followed. I thought their brand of heroism — the heroism of example, the heroism of debts repaid and causes sustained — far more inspiring than the gung-ho kind. Did it really mean much to the human race when Everest was conquered for the first time? Only because there became attached to the memory of the exploit, in the years that followed, a reputation for decency, kindness and stylish simplicity. Hillary and Tenzing fixed it when they knocked the bastard off.”

“Dimly through the silken trammels of Jan Morris's verbiage moves the figure of Elizabeth, James Morris's wife, now Jan Morris's sister-in-law, unsatisfied as a lover, deeply versed in the anguish and ambiguities of real womankind. So often when husbands are trumpeting one wonders what the silent wife is really thinking. In the same way, as Jan Morris plucks at your sleeve for a girlish heart to heart, you wonder about Elizabeth. Her unbroken silence is the truest measure Of Jan Morris's enduring masculinity.”

“In her bigoted review [Thursday] of Jan Morris's Conundrum, which gets so many facts wrong Germaine Greer describes me as a silent and anguished figure. I am not very silent, and certainly not anguished The children and I not only love Jan dearly, but are also very proud of her — Elizabeth Morris, co Royal Commonwealth Society, Northumberland Avenue, WC2.”

“For Jan did have a terribly conventional idea of what a woman was. In the book she delights in having doors held open for her, and she more than accepts being treated as the inferior and weaker sex, whatever her protestations that the world was changing. One gets the distinct impression that she would expect men to change a flat tyre for her.”

“Deeper empathy, deeper understanding, I never saw or experienced – she was, I think, incapable of truly understanding the feelings of others, and thus appeared to care little about those feelings.”

“As I grew older, I couldn't come to terms with the fact that Jan wanted to be a "woman" when her view of "women" was totally the opposite of what she was. She wasn't at all maternal; she struggled to even give her own children a hug, stiffening to a board when we tried. She couldn't cook, I never saw her clean anything and she certainly didn't want to stay at home and be with her family. She disliked the very idea of "family". The honest fact is that she didn't want to be a woman, at least not the way she saw women. And still I couldn't talk to her about it all; I just got shut down. What did she want to be? I believe she wanted to be someone totally different from anyone else, a woman who was the centre of attention because of her difference. She was no ordinary woman, as she believed the rest of us were.”