"What he realized, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Perhaps it is the only real religion — the only really felt religion — that is left to us. Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success."
"He did not hate and despise his relatives now — or not so much, at any rate. They still depressed him greatly — those poor old withering aunts and uncles, of whom two or three had already died, his father, worn out and spiritless, his mother, faded, nervy, and ‘delicate’ (her lungs were none too strong), Julia, already, at one-and-twenty, a dutiful, resigned drudge who worked twelve hours a day and never had a decent frock. But he grasped now what was the matter with them. It was not merely the lack of money. It was rather that, having no money, they still lived mentally in the money-world — the world in which money is virtue and poverty is crime. It was not poverty but the down-dragging of respectable poverty that had done for them. They had accepted the money-code, and by that code they were failures. They had never had the sense to lash out and just live, money or no money, as the lower classes do. How right the lower classes are! Hats off to the factory lad who with fourpence in the world puts his girl in the family way! At least he's got blood and not money in his veins."
I'd just finished reading 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying'. It's only been 12 years since I meant to. But what significance does time have? The cursed novel was published in 1934! It's unbearable how relevant it is. That job I almost took a year ago, the one that would let me led a semi-normal life, bask in lower middle-class comfort. It was exactly as disgusting as the New Albion one. I am still resisting the money god but I know if things get really bad I will have to submit.
The book is nothing like the movie and it really annoys me. That frivolous little adaptation! So witty and ironic and even the dialogue is completely made up. The book is raw and ugly and depressing.