All their vitality has been drained away by lack of money

It was through Hilda that I first got a notion of what these decayed middle-class families are really like. The essential fact about them is that all their vitality has been drained away by lack of money. In families like that, which live on tiny pensions and annuities — that’s to say on incomes which never get bigger and generally get smaller — there’s more sense of poverty, more crust-wiping, and looking twice at sixpence, than you’d find in any farm-labourer’s family, let alone a family like mine. Hilda’s often told me that almost the first thing she can remember is a ghastly feeling that there was never enough money for anything. Of course, in that kind of family, the lack of money is always at its worst when the kids are at the school-age. Consequently they grow up, especially the girls, with a fixed idea not only that one always IS hard-up but that it’s one’s duty to be miserable about it.

G. Orwell, Coming up for air (1939), 136-7

Science-fiction fantasy (dragons are common, the gizmos are less plausible and may include wands)

"Science fiction" is the box in which her work is usually placed, but it's an awkward box: it bulges with the discards from elsewhere. Into it have been crammed all those stories that don't for comfortably into the family room of the socially realistic novel or the more formal parlour of historical fiction, or other compartmentalized (sic) genres: westerns, gothics, horrors, gothic romances, and the novels of war, crime and spies. Its subdivisions include science fiction proper (gizmo-riddled and theory-based space travel, time travel, or cybertravel to other worlds, with aliens frequent); science-fiction fantasy (dragons are common, the gizmos are less plausible and may include wands); and speculative fiction (human society and its possible future form, which are either much better than what we have now or much worse). However the membranes separating these subdivisions are permeable, and osmotic flow from the one to another is the norm.

M. Atwood, In other worlds: SF and the human imagination (2011), 115

Don't ride a bicycle. They'll think you're a communist and run you off the road

Tuscaloosa and Alabama provided another kind of flavour - that of a democracy, but one with quite a few constraining social customs and attitudes. ("Don't ride a bicycle," I was told. "They'll think you're a communist and run you off the road.")

M. Atwood, In other worlds: SF and the human imagination (2011), 87

There aren't many tunes you can hum in the shower.

As a story, the scientific mythos is not very comforting. Probably that's why it hasn't become wildly popular: we humans prefer stories that have a central role in them for us, that preserve some of our dignity, and that implies there might be help at hand if we really need some. The scientific version of our existence on this planet may well be physically true, but we don't like it much. It isn't cuddly. There aren't many tunes you can hum in the shower.

M. Atwood, In other worlds: SF and the human imagination (2011), 55

We may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right. ... As late as October 1937 the New Statesman was treating us to tales of Fascist barricades made of the bodies of living children (a most unhandy thing to make barricades with), and Mr Arthur Bryant was declaring that 'the sawing-off of a Conservative tradesman's legs' was 'a commonplace' in Loyalist Spain. The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

G. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938), 215

English travellers ... do not really believe in the existence of anything outside the smart hotels

And it was queer how everyone expressed it in almost the same words: 'The atmosphere of this place - it's horrible. Like being in a lunatic asylum.' But perhaps I ought not to say everyone. Some of the English visitors who flitted briefly through Spain, from hotel to hotel, seem not to have noticed that there was anything wrong with the general atmosphere. The Duchess of Atholl writes, I notice (Sunday Express, 17 October 1937): 

I was in Valencia, Madrid, and Barcelona ... perfect order prevailed in all three towns without any display of force. All the hotels in which I stayed were not only 'normal' and 'decent', but extremely comfortable, in spite of the shortage of butter and coffee. 

It is a peculiarity of English travellers that they do not really believe in the existence of anything outside the smart hotels. I hope they found some butter for the Duchess of Atholl. 

G. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938), 159

I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all

No one I met at this time - doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients - failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.

G. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938), 153-4

They seemed not even to know the one thing that everybody knows in Spain

Certainly the Andalusians were very ignorant. Few if any of them could read, and they seemed not even to know the one thing that everybody knows in Spain - which political party they belonged to. They thought they were Anarchists, but were not quite certain; perhaps they were Communists.

G. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938), 84-85

Language is what you pick up naturally - everyone speaks, no problem - but science has to be learned methodically

My eager schoolteacher abandoned science to nature, assuming we would absorb the essentials through inquisitive play. Language, he used to say, was what made us different from the apes, and that was what he wanted to teach. But from my Mister Salgado I learned the reverse: language is what you pick up naturally - everyone speaks, no problem - but science has to be learned methodically, by study, if one is ever to emerge out of the swamp of our psychotic superstitions. It is what transforms our lives.

R. Gunesekera, Reef (1994), Kindle edn. loc 657

Churchill had stood out like Justinian in the twilight of Rome

[Churchill] had been a man not only whose intimate links with history ran back to the last cavalry charge at Omdurman, in the year of the death of Gladstone - but whose lifespan connected the present with that of millions who had been contemporary with Palmerston and Peel and the Duke of Wellington, and even with hundreds of thousands still alive in his youth, who had lived in the time of Napoleon, Beethoven and George III. In Britain's last great crisis as an imperial world power, Churchill had stood out like Justinian in the twilight of Rome, as a man who derived his majesty from a sense of imperial and military splendour of the past

Christopher Booker, in R. Young, Electric Eden: unearthing Britain's visionary music (2010), 490