Creativity Quote by Ruth Pitter

Devotion is doing logistics: corralling the family, setting the room, insisting everyone listen now. Pitter’s sentence moves like that kind of zeal, breathless and slightly bossy, as if she’s still mid-campaign to convert a household. The intent isn’t just to praise a “him” (a singer? a broadcaster? a composer) but to justify a private obsession as a public good. She frames listening as almost civic: “from the point of view of enjoyment people shouldn’t miss them.” Pleasure becomes an argument, not a whim.

The subtext is classically British in its self-discipline. She doesn’t say she was moved; she says she made a case, “by hard argument,” as though emotion alone would be indulgent. That phrase also hints at resistance: someone in the family didn’t want to listen, or thought the enthusiasm excessive. Pitter answers not with gush but with reasoning, and then with a quietly authoritarian conclusion: “there was only the one way for it.” Art, in her telling, is not optional once its quality is recognized.

Context matters because Pitter grew up in a world where access to great performance often arrived mediated: radio, records, the preciousness of “every word” you could capture. The line carries that archival hunger, the sense that culture can be scarce and fleeting, so you hoard it, share it, and build a small domestic audience. It’s fandom before fandom had a name: persuasive, communal, slightly militant about taste.