Sarah Caudwell > Quotes

“The trouble with real life is that you don't know whether you're the hero or just some nice chap who gets bumped off in chapter five to show what a rotter the villain is without anyone minding too much.”
― Sarah Caudwell, The Sirens Sang of Murder

“...it seems to us that the readers who want fiction to be like life are considerably outnumbered by those who would like life to be like fiction.”
― Sarah Caudwell, The Sirens Sang of Murder

“You will be interested to hear, Hilary, that it [the drug] had a most remarkable effect — even on Selena after a very modest quantity. She cast off all conventional restraints and devoted herself without shame to the pleasure of the moment."

I asked for particulars of this uncharacteristic conduct.

"She took from her handbag a paperback edition of Pride and Prejudice and sat on the sofa reading it, declining all offers of conversation.”
― Sarah Caudwell, The Shortest Way to Hades

“On my first day in London I made an early start. Reaching the Public Record Office not much after ten, I soon secured the papers I needed for my research and settled in my place. I became, as is the way of the scholar, so deeply absorbed as to lose all consciousness of my surroundings or of the passage of time. When at last I came to myself, it was almost eleven and I was quite exhausted: I knew I could not prudently continue without refreshment.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“Julia's unhappy relationship with the Inland Revenue was due to her omission, during four years of modestly successful practice at the Bar, to pay any income tax. The truth is, I think, that she did not, in her heart of hearts, really believe in income tax. It was a subject which she had studied for examinations and on which she had thereafter advised a number of clients: she naturally did not suppose, in these circumstances, that it had anything to do with real life.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“In order to deceive others, it is necessary also to deceive oneself. The actor playing Hamlet must indeed believe that he is the Prince of Denmark, though when he leaves the stage he will usually remember who he really is. On the other hand, when someone's entire life is based on pretense, they will seldom if ever return to reality. That is the secret of successful politicians, evangelists and confidence tricksters—they believe that they are telling the truth, even when they know that they have faked the evidence. Sincerity, my dear Julia, is a quality not to be trusted.”
― Sarah Caudwell, The Sibyl in Her Grave

“I should explain — in view of my last letter, you may find it slightly surprising — that Daphne and I are now bosom friends. That is to say, she seems to think we are; and I do not feel that I know her well enough to dispute it.”
― Sarah Caudwell, The Sibyl in Her Grave

“I had already established, as you know, that it was logically impossible for Kenneth to be distressed by anything that might occur between Ned and myself; but Kenneth, being an artist, has perhaps not studied logic and is unaware of the impossibility.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“Julia did very well,' said Selena, 'not to fall into the lagoon. How beastly of that woman to suggest she'd had too much to drink.'
'Most uncharitable,' said Ragwort. 'Julia, as we all know, needs no assistance from alcohol to make her trip over things.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“I would think it odd, he said, that he had never married. I did not, in fact, think it at all odd--the statistical chances against any woman being prepared to endure both the hairiness of his legs and the tedium of his conversation seemed to be negligible. I did not express this view, but said sympathetically that the military life must be difficult to combine with the domestic.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“Things, since you left, have not gone well with me: they have taken me from a place where there was gin to a place where there is no gin[.]”
― Sarah Caudwell

“I now realize that to see the Major when he isn't really there must at least be preferable to seeing him when he really is there.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“Eleanor was charming. That is to say, her manner seemed designed to merit that description: she displayed towards us a sort of girlish archness, such as a doting father might have found captivating in an only daughter at the age of eight. The effect was as of attempting to camouflage an armored tank by icing it with pink sugar: stratagem doomed to failure.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“If you're going to go and buy a load of stolen goods, you can't take a whole crowd of friends with you. The presence of third parties reduces the prospective seller to a clamlike condition.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“There are days on which Julia does not open letters. She is overcome, as I understand it, by a sort of superstitious dread, in which she is persuaded that letters bode her no good: they will be from the Gas Board, and demand money; or from the Inland Revenue, and demand accounts; or from some much valued friend, and demand an answer.”
― Sarah Caudwell, The Shortest Way to Hades

“I began to be very worried about Desdemona. We are given to understand that Othello's courtship of her consisted almost entirely of stories beginning "When I was stationed among the Anthropophagi—" or "I must tell you about a funny thing that happened during the siege of Rhodes." The dramatist Shakespeare would have us believe that she not only put up with this but actually enjoyed it: can that great connoisseur of the human heart really have thought this possible?”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“Indeed, it is a benevolent dispensation of Providence that those who express most dread of an unorthodox advance are usually those whom Nature has most effectively protected from any risk of one.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“The suggestion had been made by some of my colleagues that I should participate in the marking of the summer examinations which in Oxford we refer to as Schools. Much as I was honoured by the proposal, I had felt obliged to decline: who am I to sit in judgement on the young? Moreover, the marking of examination scripts is among the most tedious of occupations. I had accordingly explained that the demands of scholarship – that is to say, of my researches into the concept of causa in the early Common Law – precluded any other commitment of my time and energies.”
― Sarah Caudwell, The Shortest Way to Hades

“she did not, in her heart of hearts, really believe in income tax. It was a subject which she had studied for examinations and on which she had thereafter advised a number of clients: she naturally did not suppose, in these circumstances, that it had anything to do with real life.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“[The young] desire not merely to be understood, but to be understood by telepathy; not merely to be permitted to tell their troubles, but to be prevailed on to do so. The more care they take to conceal their feelings, the greater their disillusionment if one fails to discover them.”
― Sarah Caudwell, The Sirens Sang of Murder

“One doesn't like to appear vulgarly inquisitive. But if everyone one knows has suddenly started murdering everyone else, it would be terribly nice to know about it.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“Monday”
― Sarah Caudwell, The Shortest Way to Hades

“We no longer believe in it as a geographical place, like Paris or Los Angeles. Not, of course, that one ever thought that it would be anything like Paris.”
― Sarah Caudwell, The Sibyl in Her Grave

“...attachment of great intensity and passion, such as one rarely sees. One could not wish, for oneself or for one's friends, any first-hand experience of such extremity of feeling - it is not conducive to comfortable living. And yet there is about it, when observed, something curiously touching and attractive, so that one almost, absurdly, regrets one's own inability to entertain it.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“My mind was a little distracted from these anxieties by our encountering a singularly beautiful girl. I should mention, perhaps, lest I be thought in any wat to have misled my readers, that her figure was pudgy, her complexion sallow and her hair a rather drab shade of brown. These possible defects, however, pass unnoticed in a young woman whose expression is that of a medieval saint after a particularly satisfactory vision of the Eternal City.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“You do not seem to appreciate the intensity of Julia’s feelings towards the Department of Inland Revenue. She is under the impression that it is a vast conspiracy having as its sole objective her physical, mental and financial ruin.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered