Novelists From England

"The art of change-ringing is peculiar to the English, and, like most English peculiarities, unintelligible to the rest of the world."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: Wherever trouble turns up, there am I at the bottom of it."

"Mr. Ingleby: You don't need an argument for buying butter. It's a natural, human instinct."

"Mr. Hankin: ...the biggest obstacle to good advertising is the client."

"Harriet Vane: I know what you're thinking – that anybody with proper sensitive feeling would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don't see why proper feeling should prevent me from doing my proper job."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: He dogs my footsteps with the incompetent zeal of fifty Watsons."

"Harriet Vane: If anybody does marry you it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle."

"Charles Parker: We don't want to make large and ignominious public mistakes."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: Trouble shared is trouble halved."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: I'm told I make love rather nicely. Though I am at a bit of a disadvantage at the moment. One can't be too convincing at the other end of the table with a bloke looking in the window."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: It’s my belief most of us would only be too pleased to chuck these community hysterics if the beastly newspapers didn’t run it for all it’s worth. However, it won’t do to say so. (on Remembrance Day observances)"

"Lord Peter Wimsey: She has a sense of humor... and brains... life wouldn't be dull. One would wake up, and there would be a whole day full of jolly things to do. And then we would come home and go to bed... and that would be jolly too."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking."

"Sir Impey Biggs: Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force."

"Honoria Lucasta, Dowager Duchess of Denver: It's so much better to do things neatly and properly, even stupid things."

"To the person who has anything to conceal — to the person who wants to lose his identity as one leaf among the leaves of a forest — to the person who asks no more than to pass by and be forgotten, there is one name above others which promises a haven of safety and oblivion. London. Where no one knows his neighbour. Where shops do not know their customers. Where physicians are suddenly called to unknown patients whom they never see again. Where you may lie dead in your house for months together unmissed and unnoticed till the gas inspector comes to look at the meter. Where strangers are friendly and friends are casual. London, whose rather untidy and grubby bosom is the repository of so many odd secrets. Discreet, incurious and all-enfolding London."

"Sir Impey Biggs: Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: Books...are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development."

"Bunter: My old mother always used to say, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you stare them in the face hard enough, they generally run away. Lord Peter Wimsey: Your mother, Bunter? Oh, I never knew you had one. I always thought you just sort of came along already-made, so it were."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: I always said the professional advocate was the most amoral person on the face of the earth. I'm certain of it now."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: The first thing a principle does — if it really is a principle — is to kill somebody."

"George Fentiman: What’s the damn good of it, Wimsey? A man goes and fights for his country, gets his inside gassed out, and loses his job, and all they give him is the privilege of marching past the Cenotaph once a year and paying four shillings in the pound income-tax."

"When a court determines any question with respect to ... the upbringing of a child ... the child's welfare shall be the court's paramount consideration. ~ Section 1(1) Children Act 1989"

"On a recent Sunday evening, Theo came up with an aphorism: the bigger you think, the crappier it looks. Asked to explain he said, "When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in – you know, a girl I've just met, or this song we're going to do with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto – think small.""

"This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing."

"Nations are never virtuous, though they might sometimes think they are."

"We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white."

"How can one understand the inner life of a character, real or fictional, without knowing the state of her finances?"

"Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a God. … It's human, universal, [it's] being able to think our way into the minds of others. As I said at the time, what those holy fools clearly lacked, or clearly were able to deny themselves, was the ability to enter into the minds of the people they were being so cruel to. Amongst their crimes was a failure of the imagination, of the moral imagination."

"We went to a club where singers and stand-up comedians performed in the hope of being discovered. A thin girl with bright red hair and sequined T-shirt reached the end of her passionately murmured song on a sudden shrill, impossible top note. All conversation ceased. Someone, perhaps maliciously, dropped a glass. Halfway through, the note became a warbling vibrato and the singer collapsed on the stage in an abject curtsy, arms held stiffly in front of her, fists clenched. Then she sprang to her tiptoes and held her arms high above her head with the palms flat as if to forestall the sporadic and indifferent applause."They all want to be Barbra Streisand or Liza Minnelli," George explained as he sucked a giant cocktail through a pink plastic straw. "But no one's looking for that kind of stuff anymore.""

"I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way."

"Ian McEwan: I guess my starting point would be: the brain is responsible for consciousness, and we can be reasonably sure that when that brain ceases to be—when it falls apart and decomposes—that will be the end of us. From that, quite a lot of things follow, especially morally. We are the very privileged owners of a brief spark of consciousness, and we therefore have to take responsibility for it. We cannot rely, as Christians or Muslims do, on a world elsewhere, a paradise, to which one can work towards and maybe make sacrifices—and, crucially, make sacrifices of other people. We have a marvellous gift, and you see it develop in children, this ability to become aware that other people have minds just like your own and feelings that are just as important as your own, and this gift of empathy seems to me to be the building block of our moral system.Richard Dawkins: I profoundly agree with you, and I've always felt that one of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.Ian McEwan: And if you have a sacred text that tells you how the world began or what the relationship is between this sky-god and you, it does curtail your curiosity, it cuts off a source of wonder. The loveliness of the world in its wondrousness is not apparent to me in Islam or Christianity and all the other major religions."

"He had once felt light on the ground. He used to think his life was an open-ended adventure, he used to give things away, it amused him when the unexpected happened, benevolent coincidences used to bear him along. When had all that stopped?"

"You want a picture of futility? It's a tunnel in the desert, from nowhere to nowhere, four hundred and fifty feet long."

"Nearby, where the main road forked, stood an iron cross on a stone base. As the English couple watched, a mason was cutting in half a dozen fresh names. On the far side of the street, in the deep shadow of a doorway, a youngish woman in black was also watching. She was so pale they assumed at first she had some sort of wasting disease. She remained perfectly still, with one hand holding an edge of her headscarf so that it obscured her mouth. The mason seemed embarrassed and kept his back to her while he worked. After a quarter of an hour an old man in blue workman's clothes came shuffling along in carpet slippers and took her hand without a word and led her away. When the propriétaire came out he nodded at the other side of the street, at the empty space and murmured, 'Trois. Mari et deux frères,' as he set down their salads.This sombre incident remained with them as they struggled up the hill in the heat, heavy with lunch, towards the Bergerie de Tédenat. They stopped half way up in the shade of a stand of pines before a long stretch of open ground. Bernard was to remember this moment for the rest of his life. As they drank from their water bottles he was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose separate identities would remain unknown, and whose totality showed more sadness than anyone could ever begin to comprehend; a weight borne in silence by hundreds of thousands, millions, like the woman in black for a husband and two brothers, each grief a particular, intricate, keening love story that might have been otherwise. It seemed as though he had never thought about the war before, not about its cost. He had been so busy with the details of his work, of doing it well, and his widest view had been of war aims, of winning, of statistical deaths, statistical destruction, and of post-war reconstruction. For the first time he sensed the scale of the catastrophe in terms of feeling; all those unique and solitary deaths, all that consequent sorrow, unique and solitary too, which had no place in conferences, headlines, history, and which had quietly retired to houses, kitchens, unshared beds, and anguished memories. This came upon Bernard by a pine tree in the Languedoc in 1946 not as an observation he could share with June but as a deep apprehension, a recognition of a truth that dismayed him into silence and, later, a question: what possible good could come of a Europe covered in this dust, these spores, when forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?"

"Who you get, and how it works out - there's so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your unconscious choice of mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily."

"Real truth was out there in the shattered outhabs of Vervun hive. Real truth was waiting and silence, courage and stealth. Real truth was the ability to function in extremes. To fire a cannon and miss and try again. To fix a silver blade to the end of a las-weapon and leap from safety into a shroud of smoke, prepared as you did so to really use that makeshift spear. Real truth was a tiny hole in a man's forehead."

"Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn: All my life, I have had a reputation for being cold, unfeeling. Some have called me heartless, ruthless, even cruel. I am not. I am not beyond emotional response or compassion. But I possess - and my masters count this as perhaps my paramount virtue - a singular force of will. Throughout my career it has served me well to draw on this facility and steel myself, unflinching, at all that this wretched galaxy can throw at me. To feel pain or fear or grief is to allow myself a luxury I cannot afford."

"Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn: If he speaks again without me knowing who he is, I will throw him out of the window. And I won't open it first."

"Narration: Their gaze met for a few seconds. The exchange was as warm and friendly as a pair of automated range finders getting a mutual target lock."

"Commissar-General Delane Oktar: Winning is everything, but the trick is to know where the winning really is.... We're political animals, Ibram. Through us, if we do our job properly, the black and white of war is tempered. We are the interpreters of combat, the translators. We give meaning to war, subtlety, purpose even. Killing is the most abhorrent, mindless profession known to man. Our role is to fashion the killing machine of the human species into a positive force. For the Emperor's sake. For the sake of our own consciences."

"Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt: Give any man the power of a god, and you better hope he's got the wisdom and morals of a god to match. There's nothing feeble about my moral line. I value life. That is why I fight to protect it. I mourn every man I lose and every sacrifice I make. One life or a billion, they're all lives."

"In fact, the real problem with the thesis of A Genealogy of Morals is that the noble and the aristocrat are just as likely to be stupid as the plebeian. I had noted in my teens that major writers are usually those who have had to struggle against the odds -- to "pull their cart out of the mud," as I put it -- while writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate -- or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems."

"It seems to me that Justice, so far as the question of art goes, just establishes and vindicates you. (I didn't see Strife.) I've always opposed myself to your very austere method hitherto. I've not liked a sort of cold hardness in much of your work, but since it leads you at last to the quite tremendous force of the play—well, I give in."

"The novels are remarkable for a very sensitive and exact observation of life as well as for purity of style. By temperament and perhaps also by his artistic conscience Galsworthy avoided many appeals to a reader's sympathy which seemed to him not consistent with objective truth. He belonged to no political party and professed to have no political convictions."

"Pity for the unfortunate is, indeed, the main emotion roused by most of Galsworthy's works, but the only thing which really sweeps him away is mere sympathy with young love and beauty. Here, too, he never pretends that his young lovers have any especially admirable qualities; they long and they suffer, and that is enough."

"Will you let me take this opportunity of saying how much I enjoyed and admired your play Strife. It is a fine piece of work which will long survive the silly chatter of the day."

"I greatly admire the keen and vigorous way in which you are driving forward a good cause. I am in entire sympathy with your general mood."

"There can be no question that your admirable play [Justice] bore a most important part in creating that atmosphere of sympathy and interest which is so noticeable upon this subject at the present time."