Love & Passion Quote by J.B. Priestley

Priestley treats snowfall like a benign coup: the world goes to sleep as itself and wakes up newly governed by silence, whiteness, and altered rules. The line works because it refuses to romanticize snow as mere scenery. It frames it as an “event” in the civic sense, a public happening that reorganizes perception overnight. That hinge - “You go to bed... and wake up...” - is doing the real labor, compressing transformation into the most ordinary human rhythm. Magic isn’t declared; it’s smuggled in through routine.

The subtext is a quiet argument against modern disenchantment. Priestley, a novelist and social commentator who lived through two world wars and the hard glare of industrial Britain, knew how quickly the everyday can become grimly fixed. Snow offers a temporary amnesty from that fixity. It makes the familiar strange again, and that estrangement is pleasurable rather than alienating: streets softened, sounds dampened, boundaries blurred. It’s a reset button for attention.

There’s also a sly challenge embedded in the closing question: “if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?” He’s baiting the skeptic. The rhetorical move corners you into admitting that wonder doesn’t require mysticism; it can be triggered by weather, by light, by a literal change of surface. Priestley’s “enchantment” is democratic and local, available to anyone with a window and a night’s sleep - and that accessibility is exactly the point.