Historical Novelists

"Graves has a very considerable brain, but his mixture is too rich. He's mad as a hatter, but brilliant."

"When I say a man looks like a poet, I mean he looks like Robert Graves. Tall, angular, the lips sullen-sensual, the crushed but still diagrammatically aquiline nose, the rheumy eyes and their thousand-mile stare — and, with all this, a loose-limbed physicality, large, gestural: I remember him scaling the rocks that leaned up from the sandless shore — and bounding over them as he came back the other way and leapt flailing into the water. Here indeed was the warrior-poet."

"Ancient Europe had no gods. The Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless, and omnipotent; and the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought. She took lovers, but for pleasure, not to provide her children with a father. Men feared, adored, and obeyed the matriarch; the hearth which she tended in a cave or hut being their earliest social centre, and motherhood their prime mystery."

"By Jesus’s time the Law of Moses, originally established for the government of a semi-barbarous nation of herdsmen and hill-farmers, resembled a petulant great-grandfather who tries to govern a family business from his sick-bed in the chimney-corner, unaware of the changes that have taken place in the world since he was able to get about: his authority must not be questioned, yet his orders, since no longer relevant, must be reinterpreted in another sense, if the business is not to go bankrupt. When the old man says, for instance: “It is time for the women to grind their lapfuls of millet in the querns,” this is taken to mean: “It is time to send the sacks of wheat to the water-mill.”"

"Jehovah, it seems clear, was once regarded as a devoted son of the Great Goddess, who obeyed her in all things and by her favor swallowed up a number of variously named rival gods and godlings — the Terebinth-god, the Thunder-god, the Pomegranate-god, the Bull-god, the Goat-god, the Antelope-god, the Calf-god, the Porpoise-god, the Ram-god, the Ass-god, the Barley-god, the god of Healing, the Moon-god, the god of the Dog-star, the Sun-god. Later (if it is permitted to write in this style) he did exactly what his Roman counterpart, Capitoline Jove, has done: he formed a supernal Trinity in conjunction with two of the Goddess's three persons, namely, Anatha of the Lions and Ashima of the Doves, the counterparts of Juno and Minerva; the remaining person, a sort of Hecate named Sheol, retiring to rule the infernal regions."

"The chief trouble with the official style is that it spreads far beyond the formal contexts to which it is suited. Most civil servants, having learned to write in this way, cannot throw off the habit. The obscurity of their public announcements largely accounts for the disrepute into which Departmental activities have fallen: for the public naturally supposes that Departments are as muddled and stodgy as their announcements. The habit of obscurity is partly caused by a settled disinclination among public servants to give a definite refusal even where assent is out of the question; or to convey a vigorous rebuke even where, in private correspondence, any person with self-respect would feel bound to do so. The mood is conveyed by a polite and emasculated style — polite because, when writing to a member of the public, the public servant is, in theory at least, addressing one of his collective employers; emasculated because, as a cog in the Government machine, he must make his phrases look as mechanical as possible by stripping them of all personal feeling and opinion."

"The official style is at once humble, polite, curt and disagreeable: it derives partly from that used in Byzantine times by the eunuch slave-secretariat, writing stiffly in the name of His Sacred Majesty, whose confidence they enjoyed, to their fellow-slaves outside the palace precincts — for the Emperor had summary power over everyone; and partly from the style used by the cleric-bureaucracy of the Middle Ages, writing stiffly in the name of the feudal lords to their serfs and, though cautious of offending their employers, protected from injury by being servants of the Church, not of the Crown, and so subject to canon, not feudal, law. The official style of civil servants, so far as it recalls its Byzantine derivation, is written by slaves to fellow-slaves of a fictitious tyrant; and, so far as it recalls its mediaeval derivation, is written by members of a quasi-ecclesiastical body, on behalf of quasi-feudal ministers (who, being politicians, come under a different code of behaviour from theirs) to a serflike public."

"Faults in English prose derive not so much from lack of knowledge, intelligence or art as from lack of thought, patience or goodwill."

"Where is good English to be found? Not among those who might be expected to write well professionally. Schoolmasters seldom write well: it is difficult for any teacher to avoid either pomposity or, in the effort not to be pompous, a jocular conversational looseness. The clergy suffer from much the same occupational disability: they can seldom decide whether to use "the language of the market-place" or Biblical rhetoric. Men of letters usually feel impelled to cultivate an individual style — less because they feel sure of themselves as individuals than because they wish to carve a niche for themselves in literature; and nowadays an individual style usually means merely a peculiar range of inaccuracies, ambiguities, logical weaknesses and stylistic extravagancies. Trained journalists use a flat, over-simplified style, based on a study of what sells a paper and what does not, which is inadequate for most literary purposes."

"The frog-pool wanted a king. Jove sent them Old King Log. I have been as deaf and blind and wooden as a log. The frog-pool wanted a king. Let Jove now send them Young King Stork. Caligula's chief fault: his stork-reign was too brief. My chief fault: I have been far too benevolent. I repaired the ruin my predecessors spread. I reconciled Rome and the world to monarchy again. Rome is fated to bow to another Caesar. Let him be mad, bloody, capricious, wasteful, lustful. King Stork shall prove again the nature of kings. By dulling the blade of tyranny I fell into great error. By whetting the same blade I might redeem that error. Violent disorders call for violent remedies. Yet I am, I must remember, Old King Log. I shall float inertly in the stagnant pool. Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out."

"Nobody is familiar with his own profile, and it comes as a shock, when one sees it in a portrait, that one really looks like that to people standing beside one. For one's full face, because of the familiarity that mirrors give it, a certain toleration and even affection is felt; but I must say that when I first saw the model of the gold piece that the mint-masters were striking for me I grew angry and asked whether it was intended to be a caricature. My little head with its worried face perched on my long neck, and the Adam's apple standing out almost like a second chin, shocked me. But Messalina said: "No, my dear, that's really what you look like. In fact, it is rather flattering than otherwise.""

"Caligula then reintroduced treason as a capital crime, ordered his speech to be at once engraved on a bronze tablet and posted on the wall of the House [where the Senate assembled for legislative and administrative work] above the seats of the Consuls, and rushed away. No more business was transacted that day; we were all too dejected. But the next day we lavished praise on Caligula as a sincere and pious ruler and voted annual sacrifices to his Clemency. What else could we do? He had the army at his back, and power of life or death over us, and until someone was bold and clever enough to make a successful conspiracy against his life all that we could do was to humor him and hope for the best."

"Postumus was clever: he guessed that this would make Cato angry enough to forget himself. And Cato rose to the bait, shouting out with a string of old-fashioned curses that in the days of his ancestor, whose memory this stammering imp was insulting, woe betide any child who failed in reverence to his elders; for they dealt out discipline with a heavy hand in those days. Whereas in these degenerate times the leading men of Rome gave any ignorant oafish lout (this was for Postumus) or any feeble-minded decrepit-limbed little whippersnapper (this was for me) full permission— Postumus interrupted with a warning smile: "So I was right. The degenerate Augustus insults the great Censor by employing you in his degenerate family. I suppose you have told the Lady Livia just how you feel about things?""

"Athenodorus used to stroke his beard slowly and rhythmically as he talked, and told me once that it was this that made it grow so luxuriantly. He said that invisible seeds of fire streamed off from his fingers, which were food for the hairs. This was a typical Stoic joke at the expense of Epicurean speculative philosophy."

"My tutor I have already mentioned, Marcus Porcius Cato who was, in his own estimation at least, a living embodiment of that ancient Roman virtue which his ancestors had one after the other shown. He was always boasting of his ancestors, as stupid people do who are aware that they have done nothing themselves to boast about. He boasted particularly of Cato the Censor, who of all characters in Roman history is to me perhaps the most hateful, as having persistently championed the cause of "ancient virtue" and made it identical in the popular mind with churlishness, pedantry and harshness."

"Jeez, for a superior intelligence, you must be just plain dumb,' he said."

"Why get so worked up about a nonexistent threat? Answer: someone somewhere is covering something up."

"Take anything to its logical conclusion and you’re likely to end up with the grotesque and the absurd."

"Evolution takes no prisoners. A loathsome philosophy, but hard to argue against. Repulsive, but entirely valid. Otherwise, the Earth would still be populated by giant pea-brained lizards."

"You’re not supposed to be always on the doorstep clamouring for instructions. Use your discretion and your initiative, they say, that’s why you’re the grade you are. And then, when it all goes wrong, it’s all your fault. What on Earth possessed you to do all that without checking back first? How could you have been so stupid?"

"On the way out, I reflected on the way in which so many mortals pray. It’s strictly a rational proposition. If He exists, they argue, it’s best to be on the right side of Him; if He doesn’t, well, no harm done, it hasn’t cost anything. I’m not like that, unfortunately. Either I believe or I don’t. And I believed—thought I believed—in the doctrines of Saloninus concerning the invalidity of conventional morality. I believed that there are no absolutes of good and evil and that all that matters, in the final analysis, is which side you’re on. It was, I felt, a doctrine which accorded exactly with my own observations and experience. The problems start when your side isn’t on your side anymore."

"The great thing about not necessarily believing in your beliefs is that it’s so much easier to revise them."

"The fact is, the more you look for something, the likelier you are to find it, even if isn’t actually there; sooner or later, if you look hard enough, you’ll find something. The trick is then to interpret what you’ve found as what you were looking for."

"I started from the premise, which sort of came with the brief, that priests and religion are full of shit; from there it followed naturally that the morality they espouse must be false or faulty. Having established the side I was on, I looked around for arguments to support it. I found they came quite easily to me. I started with various inconsistencies in religious doctrine, and found that they derived from compromises made by long-ago ecumenical councils to reconcile violent political disputes within the clerical hierarchy. I argued, if the priests make up bits of doctrine to suit themselves, maybe they made up the whole thing. From there it was no big deal to demonstrate that they’d done exactly that. The Book as we know it proved to be not a monolithic and unambiguous record of the word of the Invincible Sun, but rather a negotiated construct, patched together from four or five sources, revised and edited and redacted by generations of scholars, some of whom belonged to such and such a sect or interest group, others of whom supported diametrically opposite positions or interests. It was no bother at all to show that the Book was a political object with no real credibility. And once you’ve knocked out the Book, you’ve dealt religion a blow from which it can never recover."

"He had the answer to the secret of the universe in his hands, but he was more interested in saving his own neck and making money. Extraordinary man."

"“You twist everything,” he said. “Guilty,” I said. “Though I prefer to think of it as a form of art.”"

"“But the unforeseen consequences—” “What consequences?” “I don’t know, I can’t foresee them.”"

"Our lot may be all-seeing and all-knowing, but that’s a long way removed from all-understanding."

"The more he asserted it, the less they believed him, which is human nature for you."

"I was deeply troubled. Not in itself unusual; but I had a distinct feeling that I’d missed something. That’s not a normal or comfortable feeling for me. I don’t miss things. Like I said, I live and have my being in the detail. Also, if I had that feeling, it was because I was meant to. It was as though he’d put up a big painted sign saying UP TO SOMETHING and was sitting directly beneath it."

"It’s a basic tenet of military science. No stronghold can be taken if a mule laden with gold bars can leave it unobserved."

"There is no word for artist in the Mysian language; instead there’s a long-winded periphrasis that translates as man-who-deceives-others-into-giving-food-by-spoiling-bits-of-wood."

"“The doctrine of sides,” he went on, “states that there is no right or wrong, only different perspectives. From where I stand, such and such a thing looks like a tree; from where you stand, it looks like a rock. For tree and rock, read sin and virtue.”"

"That’s bureaucracy for you. Never follow a straight line when a spiral will get you there eventually."

"Query: if I’d had less brains and more money, would I have been happier? Answer: if a circle had four straight sides, wouldn’t it be a square?"

"Nothing helps a lie succeed more than a generous helping of the truth."

"“I write stuff,” he said. I don’t necessarily believe it myself.”"

"Thank you for calling the Powers of Darkness. Your call may be recorded for security and training purposes. For general moral and ethical enquiries, press 1 on your keypad. To make a reservation, press 2. For details of our special discount packages for lawyers, politicians, and Microsoft executives, press 3."

"I didn't find out she was actually the Queen of the Fey until some time later. Bit of a shock, but I think we could've made a go of it, if she hadn't been so dead set on wiping out the human race."

"Treasure maps; Czarist bonds; a case of stuffed dodos; Scarlett O'Hara's birth certificate; two flattened and deformed silver bullet heads in an old matchbox; Baedeker's guide to Atlantis (seventeenth edition, 1902); the autograph score of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, with Das Ende written neatly at the foot of the last page; three boxes of moon rocks; a dumpy, heavy statuette of a bird covered in dull black paint, which reminded him of something but he couldn't remember what; a Norwich Union life policy in the name of Vlad Dracul; a cigar box full of oddly shaped teeth, with CAUTION: DO NOT DROP painted on the lid in hysterical capitals; five or six doll's-house-sized books with titles like Lilliput On $2 A Day; a small slab of green crystal that glowed when he opened the envelope; a thick bundle of love letters bound in blue ribbon, all signed Margaret Roberts; a left-luggage token from North Central railway terminus, Ruritania; Bartholomew's Road Atlas of Oz (one page, with a yellow line smack down the middle); a brown paper bag of solid gold jelly babies; several contracts for the sale and purchase of souls; a fat brown envelope inscribed To Be Opened On My Death: E. A. Presley, unopened; Oxford and Cambridge Board O-level papers in Elvish language and literature, 1969-85; a very old drum in a worm-eaten sea-chest marked F. Drake, Plymouth, in with a load of minute-books and annual accounts of the Winchester Round Table; half a dozen incredibly ugly portraits of major Hollywood film stars; Unicorn-Calling, For Pleasure & Profit by J. R. Hartley; a huge collection of betting slips, on races to be held in the year 2019; all water, as far as Paul was concerned, off a duck's {back]""

"You poor suckers [mammals]: you've got all this horrible stuff to get through somehow so obviously there's got to be an incentive, or at least some kind of fix for you to get addicted to. That's love: possibly the sneakiest trick ever played on any variety of life form by a notoriously conniving Universe. You do all these dismal, soul-destroying things because you get attached to each other."

"You want the short version. Okay, then: shit happens. Does that answer all your question? Thought not. Now, if you shut your face and let me tell this my way, we might actually get somewhere. Thank you."

"If you hadn't noticed, I'm the pub loony around here. This is my turf, and if there's any gibbering to be done, I'm the one who does it. If you want to gibber, find another bar."

"Here we go, surfing the Net again, something done by humans and very gullible fish."

"Talking to yourself is a sign of madness. Talking to yourself, dead, is class.'"

"Good guys is just a fancy way of saying Us. Bad guys is only ever Them.' -"

"Like, there's these new fundamentalist religious fanatics, some name like Meek Militant Action. Their aim's to inherit the Earth, provided nobody objects.' - c. 12"

"Vote!' [Saint] George rolled his eyes. 'This is an assassination, not a debating society.' - c. 7"

"Here and there a doorway or low arch concealed the occasional mugger, rapist or lawyer."

"[...] the dragon got three cartsful of angry letters from the Pope (which he dismissed as a load of bulls) [...]"