Igenlode Wordsmith > Igenlode's Quotes

“Joshua drives towards the Horn under the light of the stars and the somewhat distant tenderness of the moon. Pearls run off the staysail; you want to hold them in your hand, they are real precious stones that live only in the eyes. The wake spins out very far behind up the slopes of the seas like a tongue of fire and the close-reefed sails stand out against the clear sky, with the moon making the sea on the quarter glisten. White reflection of the southern ice. Broad greenish patches of foam on the water. Pointed tooth-like seas masking the horizon, dull rumbling of the bow struggling and playing with the sea.

The entire sea is white and the sky as well. I no longer know how far I have got, except that we long ago left the borders of too much behind.”
― Bernard Moitessier, The Long Way

“If meat costs 3s. 6d. a pound, we think it cheap; if vegetables cost 3s. 6d. a pound we think them dear. Moral: eat vegetables.”
― Katharine Whitehorn, Cooking in a Bedsitter

“Intent figures stood on trestle ladders peering, with the aid of inspection lamps, at the engines stripped of their cowlings. Everything was in good order and the floor of the hangar was surprisingly clean. The economical lines of the Spitfires looked very beautiful in the half-light, illuminated by the orange splashes of the lamps.”
― Ronald Adam, We Rendezvous at Ten

“While she was downstairs she could have the illusion that her mother was quietly sleeping in the bedroom; now, faced with the empty bed and the need to clear it, she had to recognise that she was alone. Slowly the tears came, accompanied by great helpless sobs. Instead of having someone to lean on, to advise her, to bully her into staying on her feet when life seemed impossibly hard, she herself would have to be the adviser, the kind helper, the referee of family quarrels; hers would be the knee on to which grandchildren would climb to be comforted, hers would be the shoulder on which the women would weep out their bereavements and all the myriad sorrows of being mams.
"Aye, Mam," she whispered brokenly, "I don't know whether I can do it.”
― Helen Forrester, Liverpool Daisy

“I look back now with some anguish to each touch and glance, to every changing conjunction of limbs and heads and hands. I have lived it over every day for so long now that I am in danger of forgetting the true shape of how it was, because each time I go over it I wish that I had given a little more here or there, or at the very least said what was in my heart, so that he could have known how much it meant to me. But I was incapable, even when happy, of exposing myself thus far.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Millstone

“(To his son Robert): I advise thee not to affect or neglect popularity too much. Seek not to be Essex; shun to be Raleigh.”
― William Cecil (1st baron Burghley.)

“Advice on lyrics given me years ago by the conductor Mark Elder seems worth pondering: if it shouts well, he said, it will probably sing well.”
― James Fenton, An Introduction to English Poetry

“For now that I have seen
The curd-white hawthorn once again
Break out on the new green,
And through the iron gates in the long blank wall
Have viewed across a screen
Of rosy apple-blossom the grey spire
And low red roofs and humble chimney-stacks,
And stood in spacious courtyards of old farms,
And heard green virgin wheat sing to the breeze,
And the drone of ancient worship rise and fall
In the dark church, and talked with simple folk
Of farm and village, dwelling near the earth,
Among earth's ancient elemental things:
I can with heart made bold
Go back into the ways of ruin and death
With step unflagging and with quiet breath.
(Martin Armstrong)”
― Brian Gardner, Up the Line to Death: The War Poets 1914-1918: an anthology

“I would divide the senior executives of the engineering world into two categories, the starters and the runners, the men with a creative instinct who can start a new venture and the men who can run it to make it show a profit.... I was a starter and useless as a runner.”
― Nevil Shute, Slide Rule

“Whether a man bows down to God or Mammon or to Cthulhu in his dark house at R’lyeh is no affair of mine . . . until he sheds one drop of blood not his own in his deity’s name. Then God have mercy upon him, for I shall not.”
― Michael Reaves, Shadows Over Baker Street

“All his life, Sherlock Holmes had believed that when one had eliminated the impossible, whatever remained —however improbable— must be the truth. Now he understood that when the impossible was too intractable to be eliminated, one had to revise one's opinion of the limits of the possible.”
― Brian Stableford

“Night poured over the desert. It came suddenly, in purple. In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way.”
― Terry Pratchett , Jingo

“It was much better to imagine men in some smokey room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn't then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told the children bed time stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was Us, then what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“Odd thing, ain't it... you meet people one at a time, they seem decent, they got brains that work, and then they get together and you hear the voice of the people. And it snarls.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“And even then, even at that moment, I did not have the courage to ask him where he lived, or to ask him what his phone number was, for it would have seemed an intrusion, an assumption that I had a right to know, that a future existed where it would be of use to know. I see, oh yes I see that my diffidence, my desire not to offend looks like enough to coldness, looks like enough to indifference, and perhaps I mean it to, but this is not what it feels like in my head. But I cannot get out and say, Where do you live, give me your number, ring me, can I ring you? In case I am not wanted. In case I am tedious. So I let him go, without a word about any other meeting, though he was the one thing I wanted to keep...”
― Margaret Drabble, The Millstone

“I let him go, without a word about any other meeting, though he was the one thing I wanted to keep: I wanted him in my bed all night, asleep on my pillow, and I might have had him, but I said nothing.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Millstone

“I had the additional disadvantage of being unable to approve my own conduct; being a child of the age, I knew how wrong and how misguided it was. I walked around with a scarlet letter embroidered upon my bosom, visible enough in the end, but the A stood for Abstinence, not for Adultery.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Millstone

“At midnight on the 4th the wind was north-north-east, force 7. Down to topsails now, her upper and lower yards naked, gleaming yellow like great bones in the moonlight, the ship was a terrible wild stranger to us. At the wheel a Swede and a Dane were fighting to hold her as she ran 13 and 14 knots in the gusts. I knew then that I would never see sailing like this again. When such ships as this went it would be the finish. The windbelts of the world would be deserted and the great West Wind and the Trades would never blow on steel rigging and flax canvas again.”
― Eric Newby, The Last Grain Race

“Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.”
― Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World

“And if the worst, or best, happens, and Death comes for you in the snow, he comes disguised as Sleep, and you greet him rather as a welcome friend than a gruesome foe.”
― Aspley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World

“For an hour or so we were furiously angry, and were possessed with an insane sense that we must go straight to the Bay of Whales and have it out with Amundsen and his men in some undefined fashion or other there and then. Such a mood could not and did not bear a moment's reflection; but it was natural enough. We had just paid the first instalment of the heart-breaking labour of making a path to the Pole; and we felt, however unreasonably, that we had earned the first right of way.”
― Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World: Antarctic 1910-1913

“A war is like the Antarctic in one respect. There is no getting out of it with honour as long as you can put one foot before the other.”
― Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World: Antarctic 1910-1913

“She wants to unburden herself, I can see that. Most people do. We all carry some burden or another, pressing into that tender spot between neck and shoulder, invisible to others, which we wouldn’t mind shucking off for a blessed moment. But we rarely do. To shuck off our burden is to show it to the world, and then what would the world say? The world would judge your burden, that’s what. The world would judge it, and how you’ve carried it all these years, and whether your burden is more or less than any other person’s, and what all this says about you. Sometimes you’re just better off carrying the damn thing into eternity.”
― Beatriz Williams, Her Last Flight

“The human brain is capable of all kinds of contortions, all kinds of earnest and precise blindnesses, in order to protect itself from the idea that it might have made a mistake. That it might have taken the wrong side.”
― Beatriz Williams, Her Last Flight

“Every story has a hero and a villain, doesn't it, and if it doesn't-- why, we fashion them ourselves. We want to take sides. We want to pledge our allegiance to one person or the other, one cause or another; to atone for our own thousand failings by planting ourselves on the high ground of righteousness, so we can crush some other poor schmuck beneath our heels and feel we are not simply right, but good.”
― Beatriz Williams, Her Last Flight

“I wanted to kill the me underneath. That fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain can’t quite deal with it. It will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I would later attempt, trying to escape that pain. This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of kill is too mild. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“David went on through the dark churchyard, over the wooden bridge where the beck chuckled unseen beneath him and an owl hooted loud above him somewhere in the starry darkness beyond the black yew-trees. The moon had not yet risen above the horizon of the high moors. But already, like a herald of its coming, the stark shapes of the Black Rocks were sharply outlined: black cut-outs against a sky clear as a blue diamond.”
― Philip Turner, Sea Peril

“In the untidy privacy of the Staff Room he had described Arthur as: 'Surprisingly cunning. Jolly adaptable for such a lump of a boy.' That Mr. Gillespie-Reeve found this surprising only showed his lack of knowledge of moorland sheep farmers, and the cunning and adaptability necessary on a bleak fellside on a dark winter night. But then he had only seen Arthur, large and solid and safe-handed, behind the wicket, or making a cheerful fool of himself over some abstruse problem in mathematics. He had never seen the same Arthur kneeling on an eighteen-inch ledge in a howling sleet-storm, using his inbred cunning and adaptability to coax an expensive and wayward ram back to safety, rather than have it fall to blackness over the edge, his only help his own wits and the unquestioning obedience of a sheep-dog.”
― Philip Turner, Sea Peril

“Courage can come from many places, and be made of many things, and yesterday's coward can become tomorrow's hero in an instant if the time is right. The giddy flood of bravery which Jezal experienced at that moment consisted largely of guilt and fear, and shame at his fear, swollen by a peevish frustration at nothing having turned out the way he hoped, and a sudden vague awareness that being killed might solve a great number of irritating problems to which he saw no solution. Not noble ingredients, to be sure. But no one ever asks what the baker put in his pie as long as it tastes well.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings

“It can be a terrible curse for a man to get everything he ever dreamed of. If the shining prizes turn out somehow to be empty baubles, he is left without even his dreams for comfort. All the things that Jezal had thought he wanted—power, fame, the beautiful trappings of greatness—they were nothing but dust. All he wanted now was for things to be as they had been, before he got them. But there was no way back. Not ever.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings