"He resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again"
About this Quote
The joke lands with a deadpan cruelty Amis perfected: a grand, heroic verb ("resolved") squandered on the pettiest possible battlefield, the minuscule swivel of an eyeball. It’s mock-epic in miniature, treating a reflex like a moral decision, and that mismatch is the point. Amis is needling the kind of brittle masculinity and self-dramatizing willpower that wants life to be a series of decisive stands, even when the stakes are laughably low.
The line’s clipped certainty makes it funnier and nastier. "Having done it once" implies motion itself is a lapse, a first taste of weakness. The vow "never" isn’t just exaggeration; it’s the character trying to legislate away the body, to convert an animal fact into a principle. That’s classic Amis territory: the intellect trying to bully the flesh, and losing in ways that are both comic and faintly pathetic.
Subtextually, it’s a portrait of denial masquerading as discipline. Refusing to move your eyes is an absurd way to avoid looking - at a person, an embarrassment, a truth. The body becomes a collaborator in repression: if you don’t track, you don’t see; if you don’t see, you don’t have to respond.
Placed in Amis’s postwar Britain - where social performance, class anxiety, and male self-regard collide - the sentence reads like a miniature manifesto of evasion. He isn’t celebrating stoicism; he’s skewering the performative rigidity that passes for it, exposing how quickly "principle" can be recruited to protect a fragile ego.
The line’s clipped certainty makes it funnier and nastier. "Having done it once" implies motion itself is a lapse, a first taste of weakness. The vow "never" isn’t just exaggeration; it’s the character trying to legislate away the body, to convert an animal fact into a principle. That’s classic Amis territory: the intellect trying to bully the flesh, and losing in ways that are both comic and faintly pathetic.
Subtextually, it’s a portrait of denial masquerading as discipline. Refusing to move your eyes is an absurd way to avoid looking - at a person, an embarrassment, a truth. The body becomes a collaborator in repression: if you don’t track, you don’t see; if you don’t see, you don’t have to respond.
Placed in Amis’s postwar Britain - where social performance, class anxiety, and male self-regard collide - the sentence reads like a miniature manifesto of evasion. He isn’t celebrating stoicism; he’s skewering the performative rigidity that passes for it, exposing how quickly "principle" can be recruited to protect a fragile ego.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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