Compton Mackenzie > Quotes

“Love makes the world go round? Not at all. Whiskey makes it go round twice as fast.”
― Compton Mackenzie

“Oh, my dear, how too marvelous! I've longed all my life to eat a flamingo.”
― Compton Mackenzie, Vestal Fire

“He’s such an extraordinarily brilliant person that it would be terrible if he let himself do nothing in the end.”
― Compton Mackenzie, Plashers Mead

“Some time ago N went over to Paris disguised as an opera singer, and he looked the part so well that the agent whom he was to meet thought he really was an opera singer and never went near him for a week. In fact, it turned out a little awkwardly, because one evening this agent saw a member of the French Cabinet dining at the Ritz and he looked so much like somebody disguised as an opera singer that this dam' fool of an agent went up and spoke to him. He was at once arrested by the French secret police, and there was nearly a most unpleasant scandal.”
― Compton Mackenzie, Water on the Brain

“Alors, ma passion n'a pas d'échos en lui. Pour lui mon tragique amour n'est rien qu'un blasphème anormal. Oh, mon Carlo, mon Carlo, et toi, tu étais mon sang, ma chair! Comme je souffre! Grand dieu, comme je souffre!”
― Compton Mackenzie, Vestal Fire

“It is only to the sentimentalist over some tame midland prospect that man appears vile. In Sirene he holds his own with the sublime eccentricity of the natural scene. In Sirene he lives.”
― Compton Mackenzie, Vestal Fire

“Never could stand very clever people. Oh, I like them very much, but I always feel like a piece of furniture they want to move out of their way.”
― Compton Mackenzie, Sinister Street

“As the tissues of the body fester and rot under X rays, so under the sun fester and rot Anglo-Saxonism and Teutonism and Scandinavianism if left too long beneath its influence.”
― Compton Mackenzie, Vestal Fire

“One is so apt nowadays to regard even one’s own motives and actions during the War with a contemptuous cynicism that it is as well to remind oneself of emotions which were profoundly and sincerely felt.”
― Compton Mackenzie, Gallipoli Memories