Grant Allen > Quotes

“Never let schooling interfere with education.”
― Grant Allen

“They were savages, yet they were ghosts. The two most terrible and dreaded foes of civilised experience seemed combined at once in them.”
― Grant Allen

“I beg your pardon," Philip interposed stiffly, now put upon his mettle. "We have no taboos at all in England. ... England, you must remember, is a civilized country, and taboos are institutions that belong the lowest and most degraded savages.”
― Grant Allen, The British Barbarians

“In fact, in this modern England of ours, this fatherland of snobdom, one passes one's life in a see-saw of doubt, between the Scylla and Charybdis of those two antithetical social dangers: You are always afraid you may get to know somebody you yourself do not want to know, or may try to know somebody who does not want to know you.”
― Grant Allen, The British Barbarians

“The big hall, badly lighted by a few contribution candles”
― Grant Allen, Delphi Collected Works of Grant Allen (Illustrated)

“I belong to the tribe of the grasshopper, not that of the ant.”
― Grant Allen, The Type-Writer Girl and The Woman Who Did

“The year used once to begin in March. That was simple and natural—to let it start on its course with the first warmer breath of returning spring. It begins now in January—which has nothing to recommend it. I am not sure that Nature does not show us it really begins on the first of October. “October!” you cry, “when all is changing and dying! when trees shed their leaves, when creepers crimson, when summer singers desert our woods, when flowers grow scanty in field or hedgerow! What promise then of spring? What glad signs of a beginning?” Even so things look at a superficial glance. Autumn, you would think, is the season of decay, of death, of dissolution, the end of all things, without hope or symbol of rejuvenescence. Yet look a little closer as you walk along the lanes, between the golden bracken, more glorious as it fades, and you will soon see that the cycle of the year’s life begins much more truly in October than at any other date in the shifting twelvemonth you can easily fix for it.”
― Grant Allen, Moorland Idylls

“Philip owned a looking-glass, and was therefore accustomed to a very high standard of manly beauty.”
― Grant Allen, The British Barbarians

“if people begin by thinking rationally, the danger is that they may end by acting rationally also.”
― Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did

“Few British birds, indeed, show higher and closer adaptation to special conditions than our dreamy night-jars, essential insect-hawkers of the dusk on open and treeless uplands. Their large and mysterious eyes, their gaping mouths, their straining fringe of bristles, their delicate owl-like plumage, their swift and silent flight, their agile movements, their eerie cry, their curious love-sick nature—all mark them out as marvellously modified nocturnal variants on the general type of the swifts and trogons.”
― Grant Allen, Moorland Idylls

“It is almost impossible to get a novel printed in an English journal unless it is warranted to contain nothing at all to which anybody, however narrow, could possibly object, on any ground whatever, religious, political, social, moral or aesthetic. The romance that appeals to your average editor must say or hint at nothing at all which is not universally believed and received by everybody, everywhere in this realm of Britain.”
― Grant Allen, The British Barbarians

“Professional considerations made the Dean refrain from endorsing this open expression of murderous sentiment in its fullest form; a clergyman ought always to keep up some decent semblance of respect for the Gospel and the Ten Commandments -- or, at least, the greater part of them.”
― Grant Allen, The British Barbarians

“But I took one look at Hatasou, whose eyes were filling in turn with sympathetic tears, and that look decided me. I flung Editha, life, and duty to the dogs, and resolved at once to become a mummy.”
― Grant Allen, My New Year's Eve Among the Mummies

“Now, nothing annoys an angry savage or an uneducated person so much as the perfect coolness of a civilized and cultivated man when he himself is boiling with indignation. He feels its superiority an affront to his barbarianism.”
― Grant Allen, The British Barbarians

“Tis life you should fear--life, with its dangers, its toils, its heartbreakings.”
― Grant Allen, Wolverden Tower

“Here in England, our night-jar is but a summer migrant, a visitor to the moors while insects abound; and we listen for him eagerly in warm May weather. He comes to us from South Africa, where he winters among the Zulus, or, rather, escapes the chill of winter altogether in the opposite hemisphere. For he must have insects, flying insects on the wing, and plenty of them. We welcome his first churring among the pines and bracken as a sign of summer; for he is a prudent bird, and seldom makes a mistake, knowing the marks of the weather well,”
― Grant Allen, Moorland Idylls

“If there is an injustice or a barbarity possible, I might have been sure the law of England would make haste to perpetrate it.”
― Grant Allen, The British Barbarians

“For the early English farmer, the world around was full of spiritual beings, half divine, half devilish.”
― Grant Allen, Anglo-Saxon Britain

“A bullet would perhaps be an unnecessarily severe form of punishment to mete out; but I confess I could excuse the man who was so far carried away by his righteous indignation as to duck the fellow in the nearest horse-pond.”
― Grant Allen, The British Barbarians

“Time passes so quickly. And if time passes quickly in time, how much more, then, in eternity!”
― Grant Allen, Wolverden Tower