Richard Hughes > Quotes

“Do your bit to save humanity from lapsing back into barbarity by reading all the novels you can.”
― Richard Hughes

“Mathias shrugged. After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances.”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

“Being nearly four years old, she was certainly a child: and children are human (if one allows the term "human" a wide sense): but she had not altogether ceased to be a baby: and babies are of course not human--they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes: the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid, since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates.
In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind.
It is true that they look human--but not so human, to be quite fair, as many monkeys.
Subconsciously, too, every one recognizes they are animals--why else do people always laugh when a baby does some action resembling the human, as they would at a praying mantis? If the baby was only a less-developed man, there would be nothing funny in it, surely.”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

“The other type of politician tends to be manipulative, selfish, and have unhealthy needs to be the center of attention.
These people play games, start rumors, get little done but take credit for
others’ work, and jockey to been seen as indispensable to their leaders.
Leaders who fall under this type of politician’s spell often have teams
with poor morale and performance.
Partners”
― Richard L. Hughes, Leadership: Enhancing the Lessons of Experience

“Since landscape changes like this from country to country it must owe very little to Nature: Nature is no more than the canvas, and landscape the self-portrait the people who live there paint on it. But no, hold hard! Surely, rather the people who have lived there; for landscape is always at least one generation behind in its portrayal.”
― Richard Hughes, The Fox in the Attic

“A method involving apparent obscurity is surely justified when it is the clearest, the simplest, the only method possible of saying in full what the writer has to say”
― Richard Hughes

“Laura lay on her back in the faint light of the open hatch. She had discarded her blanket; and the vest which did duty for a night-gown was rucked right up under her arms. Jonsen wondered how anything so like a frog could ever conceivably grow into the billowy body of a woman. He bent down and attempted to pull down the vest: but at the first touch Laura rolled violently over onto her stomach, then drew her knees up under her, thrusting her pointed rump up at him; and continued to sleep in that position, breathing noisily.”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

“Once he got bitten, and they all wept bitterly, expecting to see a spectacular death-agony; but he just went off into the bush and probably ate something, for he came back in a few days quite cock-a-hoop and as ready to eat snakes as ever.”
― Richard Hughes

“Emily and Rachel had their hair cut short, and were allowed to do everything the boys did - to climb trees, swim, and trap animals and birds: they even had two pockets in their frocks.”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

“You can never count on them. They say what they think you want them to say, and then they say what the opposing council wants them to say, too, if they like his face.”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

“Contact with a small baby can conjure at least an echo of that feeling in those who are not obscured by an uprush of maternity to the brain. Of course it is not really so cut-and-dried as all this; but often the only way of attempting to express the truth is to build it up, like a card-house, of a pack of lies.”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

“There is a period in the relations of children with any new grown-up in charge of them, the period between first acquaintance and the first reproof, which can only be compared to the primordial innocence of Eden. Once a reproof has been administered, this can never be recovered again.”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

“And then an event did occur, to Emily, of considerable importance. She suddenly realized who she was.ﾠ There is little reason that one can see why it should not have happened to her five years earlier, or even five later; and none, why it should have come that particular afternoon.ﾠ”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

“Life seemed suddenly a little empty, for never again could there happen to her something so dangerous, so sublime.”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

“The punctilious magistrate, presiding in his bivouac of matting, vanished without punctilio.”
― Richard Hughes, In Hazard

“Augustine’s own head was getting a little dizzy. All this—it was straight from the horse’s mouth indubitably, but it sounded so unreal! The sort of thing which happened to people in “history,” not people today, not real people. Anyway it was surely over now ... well—if only those crazy vindictive Frenchmen in the Ruhr”
― Richard Hughes, The Fox in the Attic

“So the summer wore on, with sloping planks arranged wherever the house or garden had shallow steps: for by now she had fully recovered the use of her arms and could trundle her chair herself (so Nursemaid Gilbert was more-or-less out of a job). She refused to be helped: she had reached a prickly stage which resented special attentions suspecting pity—and pity was unforgivable. Mary indeed seemed bent by now on impressing the world with how little she differed from you and me, except that she went on wheels where we go on feet. Poor Gilbert durstn’t even so much as pick up some book she had dropped, for Mary had special tongs (whose magnetic tips could even pick up a needle).”
― Richard Hughes, The Wooden Shepherdess

“Bushes were lying flat, laid back on the ground as close as a rabbit lays back his ears.”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

“Being shot at is so unlike what one expects it to be that one can hardly connect the two ideas enough to have the appropriate emotions, the first few times.”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

“It is a fact that it takes experience before one can realize what is a catastrophe and what is not. Children have little faculty of distinguishing between disaster and the ordinary course of their lives.”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

“It would have surprised Mrs. Thornton very much to have been told that hitherto she had meant practically nothing to her children. She took a keen interest in Psychology (the Art Babblative, Southey calls it). She was full of theories about their upbringing which she had not time to put into effect; but nevertheless she thought she had a deep understanding of their temperaments and was the center of their passionate devotion.”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

“she never knew when she might offend this inner harpy, Conscience, unwittingly: and lived in terror of those brazen claws, should she ever let it be hatched from the egg.”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

“Think of a tree. The roots of a tree spread in a most complicated manner through the ground, extracting all kinds of necessary things. This nourishment passes, unified, up the plain column of its trunk, and bursts out in the air into a countless multitude of leaves. So all the varying forces, the stresses and resistances, proceeding from that welter of machinery, are unified into the simple rotation of this horizontal column: are conducted calmly along its length into the sea: and there burgeon suddenly into the white and glass-green foliage of the swirls, the tumbling currents, the enormously powerful jostling of crowded water which is a ship’s wake.”
― Richard Hughes, In Hazard

“..: but the cracks and scars on Jonsen's enormous hands were as interesting to her as the valleys on the moon to a boy with a telescope.”
― Richard Hughes

“A school of fish, terrified by some purely submarine event, thrust their heads right out of the water, squattering across the bay in an arrowy rush, dashing up sparkling ripples with the tiny heave of their shoulders: yet after each disturbance all was soon like hardest, dark, thick, glass.”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

“The children did not answer. It shocked them deeply to have to see a grown-up, a should-be Olympian, displaying his feelings. In exact opposition to the witnesses at the Transfiguration, they felt it would have been good for them to be almost anywhere rather than there.”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

“For in public life you aren’t free to act on your inclinations or even your principles: in order to acquire power you have to forfeit free-will, which seems rather paradoxical. And how much more so must it be in a dictatorship! A man like Lenin must have about as much choice and freedom of action as the topmost acrobat in a human pyramid”
― Richard Hughes, The Fox in the Attic

“Emily was still so saturated in earthquake as to be dumb. She ate earthquake and slept earthquake: her fingers and legs were earthquake. With John it was ponies. The earthquake had been fun: but it was the ponies that mattered.”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

“... I would rather have to extract information from the devil himself than from a child.”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

“Jonsen shuffled rapidly up and down the deck like a shuttle, passing his woof backwards and forwards through the real business of the ship.”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica