Edith and Olive and me have talked it over and we want to go and make aeroplanes.
Guy left the office unashamed. He felt shaken, as though he had seen a road accident in which he was not concerned. His fingers shook but it was nerves not conscience which troubled him; he was familiar with shame; this trembling, hopeless sense of disaster was something of quite another order; something that would pass and leave no mark.
I distinctly remember last Christmas seeing you together and thinking how happy you looked, and wondering why. You’ll find it very disturbing, you know, starting off again. How old are you – thirty-four? That’s no age to be starting.
If you live with a man you come to know the other woman he has loved.
Well, I do call that a lot of nonsense. I can understand a man wishing he hadn’t married and trying to get out of it – though I never felt anything of the kind myself – but to get rid of one wife and take up with another immediately, is beyond all reason.
It was as though a deed of conveyance of her narrow loins had been drawn and sealed. I was making my first entry as the freeholder of a property I would enjoy and develop at leisure.
I am sorry to disturb you,′ said James politely, ’but these people wished to shoot us.
For Guy the news quickened the sickening suspicion he had tried to ignore, had succeeded in ignoring more often than not in his service in the Halberdiers; that he was engaged in a war in which courage and a just cause were quite irrelevant to the issue.
Ah well, to the journalist every country is rich.
There’s nothing wrong in being a physical wreck, you know. There’s no moral obligation to be Postmaster-General or Master of Foxhounds or to live to walk ten miles at eighty.
At a banquet given in his honour Sir Jocelyn Hitchcock once modestly attributed his success in life to the habit of “getting up earlier than the other fellow.” But this was partly metaphorical, partly false and in case wholly relative for journalists are as a rule late risers.
I returned to London in the spring of 1926 for the General Strike. It was the topic of Paris. The French, exultant as always at the discomfiture of their former friends, and transposing into their own precise terms our mistier notions from across the Channel, foretold revolution and civil.
As a rule there is one thing you can always count on in our job – popularity. There are plenty of disadvantages I grant you, but you are liked and respected. Ring people up any hour of the day or night, butt into their houses uninvited make them answer a string of damn fool questions when they want to do something else – they like it. Always a smile and the best of everything for the gentlemen of the Press.
We don’t get much time to read the papers.” “No, I suppose you don’t. I envy you. There’s nothing in them but lies,” he added sadly. “You can’t believe a word they say. But it’s all good. Very good indeed. It helps to keep one’s spirits up,” he said from the depths of his gloom.
I must visualize the scene, Apthorpe. When we are old men, memories of things like this will be our chief comfort.
England had declared war to defend the independence of Poland. Now that country had quite disappeared and the two strongest states in the world guaranteed her extinction.
I heard someone say that this was a very exclusive war.
My sister Cordelia’s last report said that she was not only the worst girl in the school, but the worst there had ever been in the memory of the oldest nun.
He was like a friend made on board ship, on the high seas; now we had come to his home port.
Conversion is like stepping across the chimney piece out of a Looking-Glass world, where everything is an absurd caricature into the real world God made; and then begins the delicious process of exploring it limitlessly.