Bruce Marshall > Quotes

“That's just the trouble really. Nobody's shocked by anything anymore; we're not shocked by deceit, cruelty, lust for power, faithlessness, money-grubbing. Indeed, we accept it as inevitable that each and every one of our fellow men should be impelled only by selfishness. Well, sir, let me say that it's stupid of us not to be shocked, because the continuation of our civilisation depends precisely upon our ability to be shocked.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Perhaps, though, as a Catholic padre had once suggested to him, the Italians would have been even more ignoble if they had been Methodists.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Please do not be misunderstanding me. The soldier who fights and drinks too much and makes love to pretty girls is an unhappy man, and he liked Jesus Christ and all that he has said, but he often is not liking very much those who say that they speak in His Name.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Even after he had met Maria, life hadn't been much about God, but only about Maria herself and kissing her under the brim of her wide white hat; but now that she lay there dying because she hadn't wanted to go back to Russia, the world was all about God and he didn't think Schwester Kasimira and the nuns silly any longer.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“So this is what life is really about, Twingo thought as he listened, living and dying unto God. He had seen men die on the battlefield, torn apart in a burst of entrails, and God hadn't seemed to have much to do with it, but Schwester Kasimira, reading away holy German words out of her big book, seemed to know that even those untidy deaths had been died unto God.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“I think that the trouble of the world is this: It has never been easy to obey our Lord's commands, not even in the days when all Europeans were Christians, and did not imagine that, just because they could see planets and stars and the moon at the end of a telescope, Christ had not died for their sins and risen from the dead. That was, my colonel, the great disservice your nineteenth-century materialists did to the world: to make it more difficult to obey the Lord. For there are two ways in which men and women obey the Lord: the first is because of love, and the second is because of fear, and always more have obeyed because of the second reason than because of the first.

The people who formerly obeyed because of love still obey from love, but those who used to obey because of what they were afraid was going to happen to them in the next world if they didn't, no longer do so, because the clever men have told them that the next world does not exist and that consequently after death there is neither reward of virtue nor chastisement of sin. You may not perhaps think that these things are very important, but if you wish to save European civilisation, you will be foolish not to think so.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“The colonel thought, as he had thought in Cologne after the last war, how, when you saw them with their faces growing out of their clothes, little different those who had fought for the wrong looked from those who had fought for the right and how the hair grew in the same way on the heads of the sons of Belial as on the heads of the sons of God. Beside the great round wheel of a lorry a British and a German soldier were showing each other photographs of their families, jerking with their thumbs the syntax of understanding.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“In all groups and assemblies of men there are good and there are bad men. It is unprofitable to generalize. There are good Russians and bad Russians just as there are good Germans and bad Germans and good Englishmen and bad Englishmen. I mean that the distribution of what Reverend Mother Auxilia would call the grace of God cannot be charted geographically.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Each, as they smiled, tried to convey the sympathy which they could not formulate in words, because each knew that the other's thoughts had been ruled by a different discipline, whose idiom was also different. Beyond his smile the colonel was trying to say that soldiers were not all as wicked as the nun might believe them to be; and behind her smile the nun was trying to think across to the colonel that holiness was not as dull as soldiers imagined and that it was courage and not cowardice which impelled people to forsake the world and walk with God.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Erano passati quei tempi, perché gli uomini erano stati così sciocchi da pretendere di effettuare una riforma cominciando dall'esterno anziché dall'interno e da non capire che una dottrina non è necessariamente falsa per il solo fatto che i suoi aderenti non ne sono all'altezza.”
― Bruce Marshall, Il mondo, la carne e Padre Smith

“They followed her, walking supererogatively on tiptoe, as though afraid to awaken the saints in whom they had never believed.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Il Canonico rispose che lui non era affatto d'idee larghe e che, per dire il vero, questo non gli dispiaceva, perché la larghezza d'idee spesso non era altro che superficialità.”
― Bruce Marshall, Il mondo, la carne e Padre Smith

“The thought had then occurred to her that, as it was no longer easy to be prayerful in a world which had divorced pleasure from God, there was only one solution left and that was to be gay in a convent.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Non aveva mai capito perché la gente che leggeva Edgar Wallace per gusto e che riteneva che i gatti neri portassero sfortuna dovesse sentirsi offesa dalla dottrina della transustanziazione.”
― Bruce Marshall, Il mondo, la carne e Padre Smith

“Perhaps some of them chose Schwester Kasimira's way, glorying in their discomfort because they knew that Jesus Christ hadn't stayed at the Ritz either. Perhaps there were unknown saints, Saint Ignatius Loyolas queuing at bus stops and Saint Augustines of Hippo giving up their seats on the tram. The thought made him briefly happy, seeming consecrate some of the aridity of his soldiering.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“It must be difficult for a Latin mind, even when illumined by the Holy Ghost, to accept hordes of non-practising Presbyterian highlanders, copulating G.I.s, and predatory Russians as more adequately defending Christian civilisation than the millions of Catholics who had fought against them.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Credo a tutte quelle 'fandonie' sul battesimo, sulla purezza e sulla verginità della Madonna per la stessa ragione per la quale ci credono tutti gli altri cattolici di questo mondo: che cioè Dio ce le ha rivelate come fatti certi e che il non crederci equivarrebbe a dare a Dio del bugiardo. E lo faccio col più semplice dei metodi: prima di tutto con l'obbedienza perchè Dio ci comanda di credere a questa dottrina, e poi con la logica, perchè è logico pensare che Colui il quale ha messo le stelle al loro posto e fa frullare i pianeti e rimorchia le maree sia capace di superare le limitazioni che Egli stesso ha imposto ai loro movimenti. Colui che ha forgiato il Paradiso è padrone, mi sembra, di stabilire a quali condizioni ci si entra, e così Colui che ha escogitato la matematica della procreazione e della riproduzione è padrone di saltarne il primo gradino se così gli piace. E un Dio che ha fatto cose così eccelse coi fiori, con gli alberi, con la coda dei gattini, avrà bene la facoltà di darci la sua Carne da mangiare, e il suo Sangue da bere nell'Eucaristia. Il miracolo delle leggi e delle regole, infatti, non è né più né meno miracoloso dell'infrazione di queste leggi e di queste regole".”
― Bruce Marshall, Il mondo, la carne e Padre Smith

“Young woman, I think that there are at least two things more irritating than a lighter which won't work in a train on a long journey. One of them's being disembowelled by the Gestapo, and the other's being talked at by you.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“The colonel mustn't really mind the Army being a topsy-turvy place because the Church was often a topsy-turvy place as well, with curates and chaplains often holier than canons and bishops, but of course that wasn't quite the same, because the Lord was there to guide the Church, and although she didn't want to be rude, she didn't think that He had always guided the army in quite the same way.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Please not to laugh at me. God must matter terribly to men when they are lying bleeding to death in the snow. The memory of the laughter of friends and the tinkle of glasses doesn't help them when one is alone for the last time in pain and with final knowledge of the purpose of life.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Herr Oberst, if you were one of my nuns, I should order you under holy obedience to hurt my feelings. As you are not a nun, however, I can only request you to hurt them.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Sometimes I think that the only way to unite the nations of the world would be for the earth to be attacked by Mars. We'd all love each other like hell then.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“The colonel could swear with vehemence and originality when he was angry, spilling his oaths in a pretty pepper and disproving Talleyrand's definition of swearing as the means by which the inarticulate gave themselves the impression of eloquence.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Communists cannot possibly do without God what Christians have failed to do with God.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“When we were fighting the war we were told that we were doing right, but that we have lost it, we are told that we have been doing wrong. We are wanting to know why.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“The statue was a statue of the Sacred Heart, and it wasn't a very beautiful one either, but that didn't make Schwester Kasimira want to replace it by a stag's head, because she thought that the Lord was beautiful enough as He was, and that statues at best were only approximations, and even if they were ugly, they did point the way to heaven, and that was more than could be said of cinema houses and advertisements which were generally much uglier still and rarely, in her opinion, made any sense at all.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Jesus Christ has spoken very long ago, and in simple words of meaning that could not possibly be misunderstood, unless, Herr Oberst, they were wilfully misunderstood. The words have gone out to the ends of the earth, Herr Oberst, ringing like bells across mountains and snows and rivers, telling man that whatsoever he would that men should do to him, that he should do to them, and calling upon him to love the Lord his God with his whole heart and with his whole mind, and his neighbor as himself. And in order that there should be no excuse for men not understanding, God has been allowing this lesson of love to be expressed also by the prophets of the less true religions of India and Japan and China, showing men how they might be saved from themselves not only in the next world, but in this.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“The couldn't-care-less boys, the chaps who imagined that now that the war was over there was no need for further effort, the soldiers that slopped past officers without saluting, the Very Important Persons who talked eloquent tripe with their lips and dissembled in their fatty hearts, the morons and the knaves who played for the present rather than the future, the cacklers at parties and the delighters in horses' legs, they weren't trying to try because they thought that nobody else was trying to try either. It was, of course, a contagion from which the world had always suffered, but it was much more dangerous now than in the time of Charles the Second, when boys of nineteen had not been able to destroy cathedrals by pressing buttons.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Do you know, sometimes when I think of the unhappiness of the world, I wonder if priests and nuns are not greatly responsible for men and women not listening and not obeying more. You see, we have such a very wonderful thing to say and we say it so badly. Shall I tell you a truth? Sometimes when I read holy papers I feel like becoming a little worldly myself, because of the big phrases in which big truths are stated. For big truths are most powerful in little phrases -- but there I go preaching again, and committing the sin of spiritual pride as well, because I don't express our Lord's wisdom very wisely myself.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Nobody said much after that, although they sat on for a little exchanging banalities, Colonel Nicobar, who owed loyalty to the sprawl of a tired Empire, the Russian colonel, who owed loyalty to the new terror, and the three nuns, who owed loyalty to Christ, Who had so often been betrayed. Watching the quick way they comprehended one another when they spoke of trivial things, Colonel Nicobar wondered if it was indeed possible for them to share philosophy as they shared the wind, the rain, and the stars, which was the common finger of God upon them. Outside the hoot of an engine sounded far away behind the Wiener Wald and made the colonel think of his childhood, when he had listened from a tucked-in bed to the rattle of railway trucks in a darkness which Jesus made safe.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna