A passage is not plain English – still less is it good English – if we are obliged to read it twice to find out what it means.
You don’t need an argument for buying butter. It’s a natural, human instinct.
I set out in a lordly manner to offer you heaven and earth. I find that all I have to give you is Oxford – which is yours already.
I dare say that’s an idea which has already occurred to you, but with the weight of my great mind behind it, no doubt it strikes the imagination more forcibly.
I’ll tell you why, Mr. Pomfret. Because you haven’t the guts to say No when somebody asks you to be a sport. That tom-fool word has got more people in trouble than all the rest of the dictionary put together. If it’s sporting to encourage girls to break rules and drink more than they can carry and get themselves into a mess on your account, then I’d stop being a sport and try being a gentleman.
I have a peculiar instinct about pubs. I can find one blindfold in a pea-souper with both hands tied behind me.
Fou!” “Who?” “I didn’t say ‘who’; I said ‘fou,’ ” “I know you did. I said who?” “Who?” “Who’s fou?” “Oh, is. By Jove, ‘suis’! ‘Je suis fou.
Harriet was angry, and her face showed it. Men; when they got together they were all alike – even Peter. For a moment he and Kirk stood together on the far side of a chasm, and she hated them both.
I wanted it all to be wonderful for you.’ She waited for him to find his own answer to this, which he did with disarming swiftness. ‘That’s vanity, I suppose. Take pen and ink and write it down. His lordship is in the enjoyment of very low spirits, owing to his inexplicable inability to bend Providence to his own designs.
Joyce has freed us from the superstition of syntax,” agreed the curly man.
Ah, well, as the old pagan said of the Gospels, after all, it was a long time ago, and we’ll hope it wasn’t true.
Bells are like cats and mirrors – they’re always queer, and it doesn’t do to think too much about them.
It is always reasonably easy to get conversation going in a pub, and it will be a black day for detectives when beer is abolished. After.
Her faculty for hitting the right nail on the head is almost miraculous – especially as all her blows have the air of being delivered at random. Housekeeping!
She resented the way in which he walked in and out of her mind as if it was his own flat.
But that’s men all over. They want the thing done and then, of course, they don’t like the consequences. Poor dears, they can’t help it. They haven’t got logical minds.
A novelist couldn’t possibly marry all the people from whom she wanted specialised information.
When the laws regulating human society are so formed as to come into collision with the nature of things, and in particular with the fundamental realities of human nature, they will end by producing an impossible situation which, unless the laws are altered, will issue in such catastrophes as war, pestilence and famine. Catastrophes thus caused are the execution of universal law upon arbitrary enactments which contravene the facts; they are thus properly called by theologians, judgments of God.
One must remember that though in one sense the Other World was a definite place, yet in another the kingdom of gods was within one, Earth and fairy-land co-exist upon the same foot of ground. It was all a matter of the seeing eye... the dweller in this world can become aware of an existence on a totally different plane. To go from earth to faery is like passing from this time to eternity; it is not a journey in space, but a change of mental outlook.
But peace is in the mind, and not in streets, however old and beautiful.
Young people today seem to be positively pickled in gin.