Even before the pandemic, our daily communications involved a complex mixture of authentic and fake smiles. Now that many of us are wearing face masks in public, how does it influence our communication of emotion? If we openly declare what is wrong with us, what is our deepest need, then perhaps the death and despair will by degrees disappear. J. B. Priestley Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they’re growing.” Our trouble is that we drink too much tea. I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats.

Britain, which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed, is now being bombed and burned into democracy.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? I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning. J. B. Priestley Let my soul smile through my heart and my heart smile through my eyes, that I may scatter rich smiles in sad hearts. 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.”

A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow. I have lived longer than you. I have thought more, and I have suffered more. And I tell you there is more truth to the fundamental nature of things in the most foolish fairy tales than there is in any of your complaints against life. J. B. PriestleyA novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow. J. B. Priestley