Geoffrey Household > Quotes

“I have noticed that what cats most appreciate in a human being is not the ability to produce food - which they take for granted - but his or her entertainment value. Asmodeus took to his toy enthusiastically. In another week he permitted me to stroke him, producing a raucous purr, but, in order to save his face, pretending to be asleep.”
― Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

“I have never taken sides, never leaped wholeheartedly into one scale or the other; nor do I realize disappointments, provided they are severe, until the occasion is long past. Yet I am ruled by my emotions, though I murder them at birth.”
― Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

“He who has learned not to intrude his emotions upon his fellows has also learned not to intrude them upon himself.”
― Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

“A well-trained diplomat is supposed to write French, for example, like an angel, but to speak it with the peculiar gutlessness of a Geneva nancy-boy.”
― Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

“When I heard that she was dead, I really suffered very little.”
― Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

“I distrust patriotism; the reasonable man can find little in these days that is worth dying for. But dying against - there's enough iniquity in Europe to carry the most urbane or decadent into battle.”
― Geoffrey Household

“We are so dependent on luck, good and bad. I think of those men and women—cases faintly parallel to mine—who live in one room and eat poorly and lie in bed, since their incomes are too small for any marked activity. Their lives would be unbearable were it not for their hopes of good luck and fears of bad. They have, in fact, little of either; but illusion magnifies what there is.”
― Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

“None of my mental activities for the past twenty-four hours might be called thinking. I had allowed my body to take charge. It knew far more about escaping and healing than I did.”
― Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

“The only periods, I suspect, when a man feels captain of his soul are those when he has not the slightest need of such an organ.”
― Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

“Love's only business is to preserve the race, not the individual.”
― Geoffrey Household, The Sending

“Her skin was not a surface; it was an indefinite glory of the palest rose and orange that chose to mould itself to those tense limbs.”
― Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

“I have always been sure that if England were ever occupied its people would find the organization of underground cells an almost effortless means of self-expression.”
― Geoffrey Household, Watcher in the Shadows

“One does not, I think, kill oneself without a definite desire to do so. It is hardly ever an act to which a man must key himself up; it is a temptation which he must struggle against.”
― Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

“Yet I am ruled by my emotions, though I murder them at birth.”
― Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

“I blame myself for being drawn into argument with him, but what else could I do? I was glad to hear a cultured voice, even his, after so much solitary confinement. It was, in a sense, not unlike being stuck in the club with some bore whose opinions are very left or very right. You can't do anything but listen to the man. You know he is wrong, but since you argue from the standpoint of individuals and he argues about a mythical mass, there is no common ground. And it's utterly impossible to explain yourself.”
― Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

“And the asphodel of this Hades is the cabbage.”
― Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

“There's nobody so intolerant of superstition as your half-educated man.”
― Geoffrey Household, Taboo

“Time drags only when one is thinking fast.”
― Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

“Emotions are quite harmless once they are out of the system...It's when they stay inside that they give trouble.”
― Geoffrey Household, Taboo

“There I wove so complicated a pattern that boat-footed Artemis must have thought her long-eared darlings were on the line of a hare.”
― Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

“The full essence of Americanism in the Canal Zone is too overwhelming a contrast to the Spanish-American city. And that is a violent way to taste a new country. You might as well get your first impression of the British from the Gezireh Club in Cairo. Clean, self-consciously bright, admirably ordered for the consumption of ice-cream in friendly surroundings—that was my melancholy impression. The result to this day is that when I think of the United States, its aspect as a respectable middle-class holiday camp dominates all others. And that is unfair. If I had entered by New York, I should have found the stronger living and coarser laughter to which I was accustomed translated across the Atlantic into a city of exquisite beauty, with green and peaceful farming country easily to be reached at need. But there it is. My emotions insist that every American lives in a well-ordered suburb, whereas statistics, let alone observation, prove he does nothing of the sort. I am closer, perhaps, to a spiritual truth—for it is undeniable that the nearer any foreign community approaches the ideal of a garden city run by a council of advertising managers, the more Americans are at home in it.”
― Geoffrey Household, Against the Wind: An Autobiography

“I dressed myself in the warmest of my working clothes, tearing off all distinguishing marks and the maker’s name. I put a flask of whisky in my inside-breast-pocket, and took plenty of food. I could be away for days without worrying.”
― Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

“The poets are wrong when they describe the grave as cold.”
― Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

“My arrival was noticed only by a boy and girl, the inevitable boy and girl to be found in every dark corner of a great city. Better provision should be made for them—a Park of Temporary Affection, for example, from which lecherous clergymen and aged civil servants should be rigorously excluded.”
― Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

“Taken aback by the discovery, a little too late, that tropical rain has the volume of a bathroom shower, I splashed on to a train for Panama City, put up at the Hotel Europa and restored equanimity with Planter’s Punch. A world in which so delectable a drink existed, as well as the thirst necessary to deal with two successive pints of it, could not be wholly bad. In the evening I set out to inspect North American civilisation.”
― Geoffrey Household, Against the Wind: An Autobiography

“I like to see a billy-goat accompanying the dairy herd to pasture, supposedly to bring them luck or to eat the herbs that cause abortion.”
― Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

“If a man is clean shaved and has a well-fitting collar and tie - even reasonably dirty - he can get away with a multitude of suspicious circumstances”
― Geoffrey Household

“I have noticed that what cats most appreciate in a human being is not the ability to produce food—which they take for granted—but his or her entertainment value.”
― Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

“In these days of visas and identification cards it is impossible to travel without leaving a trail that can, with patience, bribery, and access to public records, be picked up. In the happy years between 1925 and 1930 you could talk yourself over any western European frontier, so long as you looked respectable and explained your movements and business with a few details that could be checked; you could treat frontier police as men of decency and common sense: two virtues that they could then afford to indulge. But now unless a traveller has some organization – subversive or benevolent – to help him, frontiers are an efficient bar to those who find it inconvenient or impossible to show their papers; and even if a frontier be crossed without record, there isn’t the remotest village where a man can live without justifying himself and his reasons for being himself. Thus Europe, for me, was a mere trap with a delayed action.”
― Geoffrey Household