Dan Billany > Quotes

“When I try to analyse my delight in seeing foreign towns, I find that it isn’t so much the differences from home which strike me, as the similarities.”
― Dan Billany, The Trap

“Homework is a barbaric ritual: see Veblen, ‘Theory of the Leisure Class’, chapter on The Higher Learning. Chain of ostensible reasons: — if the children don’t do homework, they won’t pass the examinations: if they don’t pass the exams, they won’t be able to make a living. If it’s untrue, what an imposition. If true, what an imposition!”
― Dan Billany, The Trap

“A human boy, and all civilization could do for him was to smash him between two blocks of concrete. In the thirteenth year of his life, we were putting him into a hole in the ground so that he shouldn’t rot on the surface — that and no more. Let those who helped to commit the crime expiate it.”
― Dan Billany, The Trap

“Blood was splashed all over the interior. The ‘Guide to Kulchur’ was soaked in blood. Blood was spattered all over coats, blankets, sheets, and a cut-down mattress on a bunk: in one corner these things were stiff with blood. This was the practical issue of the conferences of statesmen, of ‘failures to reach unanimity on certain points’, of high principles and councils of war: this was what the talk of Empire and Sovereignty and Fatherland and Motherland really meant. This was how they solved their problems. Just this.”
― Dan Billany, The Trap

“An army! Not an idea in it, not an ideal, not a fighting spark, not a flash of imagination, not a capful of the fresh air of inspiration in it: just a dead, frozen, congealed mass of routine, restriction and prejudice, mud, leaves and dead twigs that any January might freeze together: paltry, petty, incapable, craven, dead-brained: betraying the faith and courage of the soldier: holding together, not by a common aim and a common resolution, but by the sheer weight of inertia and blanco. Blanco, symbol of the corruption of the army, blanco, as stiff as starch, and crumbling to dust under the first pressure.”
― Dan Billany, The Trap

“The sea merely talked to itself, groaned, could not sleep. Eavesdropping, all we learned was that we could die, and that it could be that we should never meet again, in this world or any other.”
― Dan Billany, The Trap

“Over the bodies of children and old people the wolves are scrambling. Diplomatic wolves, wolves who knew all about oil concessions, international credits, trade routes, and a steady five per cent. The diplomatic wolves show their grinning, polite, pointed teeth. Over the bodies of children and old people.”
― Dan Billany, The Trap