R.C. Sherriff > Quotes

“The golden hours of life leave no sharp outlines to which the memory can cling: no spoken words remain - nor even little gestures and thoughts; only a deep gratitude that lingers on impervious to time.”
― R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

“The attraction of the story was that I didn’t lay out any plan and never knew what was going to happen in the next chapter until I came to it. It kept me in sympathy with the characters, because when they went to bed each night they knew no more about what was going to happen next day than I did when I turned out the light on my desk and went to bed myself.”
― R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

“They had reached the strange, disturbing little moment that comes in every holiday: the moment when suddenly the tense excitement of the journey collapses and fizzles out, and you are left, vaguely wondering what you are going to do, and how you are going to start. With a touch of panic you wonder whether the holiday, after all, is only a dull anti-climax to the journey.”
― R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

“You must always think of it like that if you can. Think of it all as - as romantic. It helps.”
― R.C. Sherriff, Journey's End

“A dugout got blown up and came down in the men's tea. They were frightfully annoyed.”
― R.C. Sherriff, Journey's End

“She doesn't know that if I went up those steps into the front line – without being doped with whisky – I'd go mad with fright.”
― R.C. Sherriff, Journey's End

“And because he's stuck it till his nerves have got battered to bits, he's called a drunkard.”
― R.C. Sherriff, Journey's End

“It is remarkable how quickly a fine sunlit day can dissolve one's cares.

[Edgar Hopkins]”
― R. C. Sherriff

“Ernie was the most deeply concerned. He had waited a month for this unusual view of the house, and as they flew by he desperately searched the roof gutter for his tennis ball.”
― R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

“But he knew that time only moved evenly upon the hands of clocks: to men it can linger and almost stop dead, race on, leap chasms and linger again. He knew, with a little sadness, that it always made up its distance in the end. To-day it had travelled gropingly, like an engine in a fog, but now, with each passing hour of the holiday it would gather speed, and the days would flash by like little wayside stations. In a fortnight he would be sitting in this room on the last evening, thinking how the first night of the holiday seemed like yesterday—full of regrets at wasted time.…”
― R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

“as they passed your seat, you saw them vividly as individuals, and now and then there would be one who struck a spark of interest that smouldered in your memory after they had gone. I began to feel the itch to take one of those families at random and build up an imaginary story of their annual holiday by the sea.”
― R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

“Ernie’s eyes were riveted on the collector’s hands as they slid the tickets together into a neat pack and punched a V-shaped nick in them with a sweep of the powerful clippers: then his eyes travelled to the collector’s face to see if it registered the pleasure which he himself could never have concealed had he been allowed to do it. He resented the man’s bored face, and placed him at once among the people who did not realise their luck. It was a mystery to him why so few people felt the fierce joy of clipping tickets.”
― R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

“The encrusted habits of long and self-indulgent bachelorhood were reasserting themselves.

[Edgar Hopkins]”
― R. C. Sherriff

“My vocabulary hadn’t been up to it. I’d floundered about, hunting up unfamiliar words that I’d never written down before, getting baffled and entangled and frustrated. But I shouldn’t be writing now with an eye to publication. Even if it got finished I’d never offer it to a publisher and risk another fiasco. I wanted to write for the sake of writing, and got started one evening in my hotel bedroom.”
― R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

“It is in the nature of men to do their best and deepest thinking when the sun’s going down.”
― R.C. Sherriff

“How splendid it all was!—The whole family going away together again, after those dark, half-thrown hints from Dick and Mary about separate holidays with their friends. Thank God they had come to nothing!”
― R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

“Molly had been a young girl when the Stevens first came to “Seaview,” and Mr. Stevens still treated her rather as a child. Her plainness was almost an affliction: her large flat face, her podgy nose and pale, freckled skin would have been repulsive without the unfailing good nature and patience that turned physical ugliness into a trivial thing. A stout little dynamo of energy worked her squat, stunted body and drove it unceasingly from dawn till night. She never seemed to tire and she never lost her cheerful smile.”
― R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

“Mrs. Stevens did not really mind, one way or another: she did not bathe, so would not feel the greater comfort of a larger hut, and in her heart of hearts she preferred to sit in her deck chair on the beach, with the seething life around her. She did not have people about her during her daily work at home, like the others did, and on holiday it came as a change to be amongst the crowd”
― R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

“They must have been at Bognor quite a time to get their arms that beautiful colour. She looked down at her own, which were still no more than flushed. She glanced to one side of her, at her father’s knees, grey flannel trousers and canvas shoes: to the other side, at her mother’s little blue serge lap with her purse upon it—and suddenly she felt hemmed in—a prisoner. It was ungrateful and mean to think of it in that way, but she couldn’t help it. The girls over there looked so free, and cool—and easy. She wondered how they got to know the bandsmen, and hoped, for some absurd, vague reason that they were old friends—or relatives.”
― R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

“Stevens saw her almost every day, they had never seen her face. She was always just disappearing into her bedroom, or just disappearing into the bathroom—or moving silently away from them down the passage. She disappeared sometimes so mysteriously that Ernie thought she must have a way of vanishing through the wall.”
― R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

“The family one is restrained below their natural selves—the one revealed to strangers is inclined to be jaunty and artificially buoyant. They consequently become uneasy and embarrassed when by force of chance they have to reveal themselves before strangers and family at one and the same time, and they go to the most unreasonable pains to avoid it.”
― R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

“They were a delightful old couple: connoisseurs of happiness...

[Edgar Hopkins, on his Aunt Rose and Uncle Henry]”
― R. C. Sherriff

“There was a rack, just like theirs, in Mrs. Haykin’s hall—but how different it looked! A solitary, curious little bonnet hung from one peg and a grey woollen scarf from another, but the rest were empty. Mary could never remember seeing an empty peg in their own hall at home: if you took a coat off there was always something underneath.”
― R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

“But to Mrs. Stevens, “Seaview” was only the background of a fortnight in each year which troubled and disturbed her. She hated herself for not enjoying it as the others did. It made her unhappy to pretend she was enjoying herself, because it was a sham: somehow dishonest. Dick, round about fourteen—digging in the sand—his sunburnt legs bare to his tucked up shorts—would run to her suddenly with “Isn’t it lovely, Mum!” and she would say “Lovely” and smile, and hate herself for the lie.”
― R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

“For Dick and Mary, going once more into their old, familiar little bedrooms, had wondered with sinking hearts why they had never noticed in other years how dreadfully dingy and terribly poor they were. Was it a growing desire for better things?—or had these little rooms suddenly shrunk—become darker—and almost squalid?”
― R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

“In the shock of disillusion he had recoiled upon his schooldays—seeking security and courage from memories—from Belvedere College—and he had found that no firm ground lay even there. Just a big ugly converted private house: forlorn bare windows: a worn-out garden trampled bare by boys. That was all that remained when he turned his eyes back to it—the veneer of boyish romance peeled off, and a skeleton of pathetic, pretentious make-belief grinned at him and said, “Now you know.”
― R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

“If God could create us then God could control our brains and minds: if we had failed it was because He had been unable to make better creatures of us, and that was His fault – not ours.”
― R.C. Sherriff, The Hopkins Manuscript

“It was a lovely day with a hint of spring in the air and I enjoyed it all immensely. The mild weather had encouraged the bulbs: the crocuses were spangling the glades of the Park with a sheen of gold and blue, and as I lay under the trees eating my sandwiches I could picture these woods in a few weeks' time with their glimmering carpet of daffodils.

[Edgar Hopkins]”
― R. C. Sherriff

“It was hard to thank Mrs. Haykin and get away. It made you feel rather unhappy, too—and selfish, because Mrs. Haykin never had a holiday herself. She lived alone. Once, so neighbours said, she had had a husband, three sons and a daughter there, and somebody was always going in and out. But that was long ago—before the Stevens’ time.”
― R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

“... the sort of smiles used at weddings, turned on very carefully to half pressure to prevent them wearing out.”
― R.C. Sherriff