Darling, if you danced like an elderly elephant with arthritis, I would dance the sun and moon into the sea with you. I have waited a thousand years to see you dance in that frock.
Something was jigging and worrying in his brain; it felt like a hive of bees, stirred up by a stick.
I’ve hated almost everything that ever happened to me, but I knew all the time it was just things that were wrong, not everything. Even when I felt most awful I never thought of killing myself or wanting to die – only of somehow getting out of the mess and starting again.
He has the valuable quality of being fond of people without wanting to turn them inside out.
What was that you called me?’ ‘Oh, Peter – how absurd! I wasn’t thinking.’ ‘What did you call me?’ ‘My lord!’ ‘The last two words in the language I ever expected to get a kick out of. One never values a thing till one’s earned it, does one? Listen, heart’s lady – before I’ve done I mean to be king and emperor.
Detachment is a rare virtue, and very few people find it lovable, either in themselves or in others. If you ever find a person who likes you in spite of it-still more, because of it-that liking has very great value, because it is perfectly sincere, and because, with that person, you will never need to be anything but sincere yourself.
Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion.
Persons curious in chronology may, if they like, work out from what they already know of the Wimsey family that the action of the book takes place in 1935; but if they do, they must not be querulously indignant because the King’s Jubilee is not mentioned, or because I have arranged the weather and the moon’s changes to suit my own fancy. For, however realistic the background, the novelist’s only native country is Cloud-Cuckooland, where they do but jest, poison in jest: no offence in the world.
To learn six subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to a seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door.
The rest were nondescript, as yet undifferentiated – yet nondescripts, thought Harriet, were the most difficult of all human beings to analyze. You scarcely knew they were there, until – bang! Something quite unexpected blew up like a depth charge and left you marveling, to collect strange floating debris.
I sleuth, you know. For a hobby. Harmless outlet for natural inquisitiveness, don’t you see, which might otherwise strike inward and produce introspection an’ suicide. Very natural, healthy pursuit – not too strenuous, not too sedentary; trains and invigorates the mind.
Damn it, she writes detective stories and in detective stories virtue is always triumphant. They’re the purest literature we have.
Don’t let the smallest chance slip by; you never know until you try.
We dole out lip-service to the importance of education – lip-service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school-leaving age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school hours; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.
Harriet laughed, remembering suddenly that a novelist owes a duty to her newspaper reporters.
After all, he thinks conscience is a sort of vermiform appendix. Chop it out and you’ll feel all the better.
It will be sent that, although the writer’s love is verily a jealous love, it is a jealousy for and not of his creatures. He will tolerate no interference either with them or between them and himself.
Why doesn’t God smite this dictator dead?′ is a question a little remote from us,” says one of the characters in The Man Born to Be King. “Why, madam, did he not strike you dumb and imbecile before you uttered that baseless and unkind slander the day before yesterday? Or me, before I behaved with such cruel lack of consideration to that well-meaning friend? And why, sir, did he not cause your hand to rot off at the wrist before you signed your name to that dirty little bit of financial trickery?
It was the room of a woman without taste or moderation, who refused nothing and surrendered nothing, to whom the fact of possession had become the one steadfast reality in a world of loss and change.
It is the dogma that is the drama – not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death – but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that a man might be glad to believe.