Novelists From England

": You seem to regard marriage as a game, sir. : Not marriage, Inspector. Sex. Sex is the game with marriage the penalty."

": You must be joking. : You would know it if I were."

": I hear she's a scrubbed blonde with all the sex appeal of chilled Dettol. : (with dignity) There are those who believe that cleanliness is next to sexiness."

": Supposing someone saw you climbing in? : Who? You're not overlooked. : Who knows? A dallying couple. A passing sheep rapist."

"Celebrating Christmas without subscribing to Christianity is like watching the Super Bowl without having watched a single regular-season football game all year. Some people watch the Super Bowl exclusively for the commercials; others watch it for the halftime show."

"Christmas sits like a black hole on the calendar, and the other holidays implied by "happy holidays"—Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, New Year's Day, etc.—are powerless to be drawn in by its force."

": You have to be serious if you want to be in love. : You have to be serious about crime if you want to afford to be in love."

": So she's used to luxury. Whose fault is that? : It's not a fault if you can afford it. But can you?"

": You can take it from me that Tēa's an engaging little trollop, and she suits me mightily. Mind you, she takes a bit of keeping up with, it's a good thing I'm pretty much of an Olympic sexual athlete. : I suppose these days you're concentrating on the sprints rather than on the long distance stuff. : Not so, dear boy. I'm in the pink of condition. I could copulate for England at any distance. : Well, they do say in Olympic circles, that the point is to take part, rather than to win, so I suppose there's hope for us all."

": You were disparaging my lover. : On the contrary, I was reminiscing about my wife. : It comes to the same thing. : Things mostly do, you know."

"Bachelors have many advantages, but they are all minor. Perhaps the greatest advantage they enjoy is that of still being able to follow an impulse; but even this rarely seems to give them all the pleasure that it would give many a man who has tasted restriction. Feeding on impulses can become as distasteful as feeding on jam roll."

"The art of life...is to show your hand. There is no diplomacy like candour. You may lose by it now and then, but it will be a loss well gained if you do. Nothing is so boring as having to keep up a deception."

"It is all as it should be if they were really friends once, for friends, in fact, belong to periods rather than to all time, although sentiment would have it otherwise. One is always changing a little, although of radical change there is almost none, and new friends are found in tune with each stage."

"The art of life...is to be thought odd. Everything will then be permitted to you."

"I see that the pigeon-holes of Fleet Street must be full of these anticipatory articles which only need occasional revision to date to be all ready when the scythe is finally sharpened. To meet an editor must be for a thoughtful celebrity as chilling as the spectacle of the mummy at the Egyptian banquet."

"It was a dull day for English readers (I think) when the description of the person was first considered unnecessary. We rarely get it now."

"The time for second-hand book-shops...is after one's work, not during one's work."

""Well," I said, "I'm sorry if cheerfulness is so impracticable. It would be new, at any rate, and novelty is said to be a great thing." "Not in songs," replied Alf. "They don't want anything new in songs except the tune. They've all got to be about the same things for ever and ever.”"

"People in hotels strike no roots. The French phrase for chronic hotel guests even says so: they are called dwellers sur la branche."

"The man who is so painstakingly cautious about doing his own body no harm seldom does anything for anyone else."

"It is possible to give wedding presents, birthday presents, and Christmas presents without any thought or affection at all: they can be ordered by post card; but the unbirthday present demands the nicest care. It is therefore the best of all, and it is the only kind to which the golden rule of present-giving imperatively applies — the golden rule which insists that you must never give to another anything that you would not rather keep for ourself, nothing that does not cost you a pang to part from."

"I should have remembered that black is the colour of France. Amusing that the typical figure of that country in so many people's imagination is a saucy girl with little or nothing on, whereas in reality it is an old woman in mourning."

"Fixed customs must be surrendered, lateness must become punctuality, cigarette ends must not burn the mantelpiece, one misses one's own China tea. The bathroom is too far and other people use it. There is no hook for the strop. In short, to be a really good guest and at ease under alien roofs it is necessary, I suspect, to have no home ties of one's own ; certainly to have no very tyrannical habits."

"Suzanne could not read a word, but the last atom of flavour was conserved in every dish that she sent to table; and what is literature compared with cooking? One is shadow and the other is substance."

"The books that one reads in the impressionable years, and therefore absorbs and remembers, are always so much better and more exciting than life."

""Lotus-eating would give you a terrible stomachache," I said, "wouldn't it?" And the plucky little creature had the hardihood to reply, "I hope so." What can you do with people like this? and England is full of them. Suspicion of happiness is in our blood."

"I bade farewell to the May stars, and did one of the most adventurous things left to us — I went to bed. For no one can lay a hand on our dreams. All the authors of the world cannot spoil those."

"The truth is the only thing worth having, and, in a civilized life, like ours, where so many risks are removed, facing it is almost the only courageous thing left to do."

"I walked back by way of the sea-lions' enclosure to refresh my eyes with the King Penguin's perfect ecclesiastical tailoring. He was pacing moodily about as usual, in what one felt to be the interval between a marriage ceremony and a funeral service. Much better, I thought, to have left the £2000 a year to him. No harm would then be done, and what perfect episcopal garden-parties he could give with it!"

"I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them."

"To-day — well, my Utopia, if ever I framed one, would be a land where the laws demanded that people should be vicious. Then one would be able to count at any rate on a little virtue. If no man might live with a woman in any but an irregular union, there would be at once quite a run on honest matrimony and the Law Courts would be full of desperately wicked monogamists; while if every one was expected to steal and swindle, there would soon be an extensive criminal class who respected property."

""What is it like in the air?" I once asked him. "Ripping," he said. "But the sensations?” I continued. “How do you feel?" "Ripping," he said. "And what does the world look like down below as you rush along?" "Ripping," he said."

"When it comes to analysing the pleasures of life, the privilege of approving and disapproving in conversation must be ranked very high, and reading aloud makes it so very harmless an amusement, since no talebearing is involved."

"The French never allow a distinguished son of France to lack a statue."

"What does matter is that in a French inn you may be as witty as you can, as intelligent as you can, but some one there will be more intelligent, more witty."

"How can Nancy know her own mind when she has not got one? She is a dear, sweet girl, and I was devoted to her—am devoted to her—but she has no mind. It was I who was to give her that."

"It is all to the good that insignificant-looking persons should do great things, but human nature will ever resent it. We are such determined idealists, we have such a passion for symmetry, that our first wish will always be that handsome does and handsome is shall be one."

"The trouble is that really wanting things is so rare. It's a lukewarm world!"

"Have misfortune and disease and frustration and insecurity been necessary to man's ingenuity and industry? Without sorrow should we have had no telegraph? without tears, no camera? Have all the benefits of civilisation been wrung from us in some effort to escape from the blows of fate? And even if so, might not happiness, without the advantages of progress, have still been better?"

"He was born in 1770, in what he thought the best of all lands— Ireland; and he came home from the sea in 1802, but he did not take his pen in hand until 1836, during which time his memory had purged itself of inessentials. He wrote them not for the cold eye of a publisher's reader but (like a gentleman) for his own family's entertainment."

"I wonder that affectionate parents can ever give their consent to their children's marriage at all. I can understand a father having no particular objection to his son's wife, and a mother to her daughter's husband; but how a father can ever even tolerate his daughter's husband or a mother the wife of her son, that is beyond my imagination."

"In France he would have been, I think, a sad bore, for there he would have discovered so many points of superiority to the English: but not even so keen a censor of his own country and countrymen as Mr. Dabney could find aught in Venice, except such forgivable and inimitable advantages as crumbling and picturesque architecture and clear skies, to hold up as a model for home adoption."

"I never need to see any one twice to know them. My first impressions are always right. Sometimes I go back on my first impressions, but it is always a mistake to do so."

"I know nothing of grammar; At school they never could hammer Or beat it into my head. The bare word made me stammer, And turn pale as if I were dead. But here I may as well be telling, I'm often damned out in my spelling."

"The world is a great leveller, and every year brings with it certain modifying influences. I like a man to be his age. Twenty-one is not an age I am very partial to: it is omniscient and exorbitant and cruel; but I like a youth of twenty-one none the less. Forty makes better company: when a man knows how little he knows, and how little life holds for him, and is yet unsubdued."

"We have to remember that children, as creatures of delight, are of comparatively recent discovery....A few poets had praised the young very gaily — Prior and Ambrose Phillips, for example — but rather as courtiers than human beings: it was left for Blake first to see that the child was not merely the young of man but a separate creature, filled with fugitive and exquisite charm."

"It is when one reads counsels of something more than perfection — counsels of pedantic priggishness, shall we say — to natural, healthy children, that one realises how necessary compromise is to daily life and how far removed perfection is from the natural human being."

"It came to me this morning all unexpectedly, being the payment of a debt which I had long since given up hope of ever receiving. In other words, it is sheer profit, like all repaid loans."

"Venice indeed imposes laziness. Even Americans doing Europe approach restfulness there. There is no hurrying a gondolier."

"I could go on indefinitely thus, calling forth from their graves these hard-bitten sea dogs; but that is enough. It is literature in its way, is it not? Are there the same or kindred characters in the Navy to-day, one wonders. Let us hope so."