"The English have an extraordinary ability for flying into a great calm"
About this Quote
Woollcott’s line lands because it steals the grammar of melodrama and hands it to restraint. “Flying into” promises a fit: flared nostrils, slammed doors, a scene. Then he swaps the payload for “a great calm,” turning composure into an event as theatrical as any tantrum. It’s a miniature comic trap, and it flatters Woollcott’s métier as a critic: the pleasure isn’t in the opinion (the English are calm) but in the sly mechanism that exposes how performed that calm can be.
The intent is affectionate needling with a sharp edge. He’s not praising serenity so much as diagnosing it as a reflex, almost a national kink: when emotions threaten to become legible, the body lunges toward poise. “Extraordinary ability” reads like a compliment until you realize it’s a backhanded one, implying training, habit, even denial. Calm isn’t the absence of feeling; it’s the chosen costume.
Context matters. Woollcott, an American tastemaker with a transatlantic gaze, wrote in an era when “Englishness” circulated as a brand: stiff upper lip, imperial confidence, clubroom understatement. Between wars, that posture was both admired and suspected - socially useful, politically evasive. The line captures the soft power of understatement: it can dignify crisis, but it can also smother accountability. By making calm something you “fly into,” Woollcott hints that stoicism is less temperament than choreography, a national performance perfected to look like nature.
The intent is affectionate needling with a sharp edge. He’s not praising serenity so much as diagnosing it as a reflex, almost a national kink: when emotions threaten to become legible, the body lunges toward poise. “Extraordinary ability” reads like a compliment until you realize it’s a backhanded one, implying training, habit, even denial. Calm isn’t the absence of feeling; it’s the chosen costume.
Context matters. Woollcott, an American tastemaker with a transatlantic gaze, wrote in an era when “Englishness” circulated as a brand: stiff upper lip, imperial confidence, clubroom understatement. Between wars, that posture was both admired and suspected - socially useful, politically evasive. The line captures the soft power of understatement: it can dignify crisis, but it can also smother accountability. By making calm something you “fly into,” Woollcott hints that stoicism is less temperament than choreography, a national performance perfected to look like nature.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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