Michael Whiteway > Michael's Quotes

“People who like quotations love meaningless generalisations.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“Living rather ascetically, travelling third-class when he was alone, with the cheapest wine, and good care of his clothes, and penalizing himself for any extravagances, he maintained a qualified financial independence.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“The books of jurisprudence were interesting to few, and entertaining to none: their value was connected with present use, and they sunk forever as soon as that use was superseded by the innovations of fashion, superior merit, or public authority.”
― Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volume II

“The mere words “Socialism” and “Communism” draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacifist, and feminist in England. . . . The food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“She always was highly strung,” pursued Henry, leaning back in the car as it shot past the church. “A tendency to spiritualism and those things, though nothing serious. Musical, literary, artistic, but I should say normal—a very charming girl.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“As an adult, and as a poet of deprivation and ‘being on the edge of things’, Larkin championed public and university libraries. Though sympathetic to Toryism, he came to oppose the 1980s trends—new public management and neo-classical economics—that were antithetical to libraries. For many years, Larkin was university librarian at Hull University’s Brynmor Jones Library. When Larkin first met a new vice chancellor there, the VC asked for the library’s payroll/non-payroll breakdown. ‘Mind your own fucking business’ was the poet’s muffled reply. Larkin served on the board of the British Library, but resigned because of the early starts, and because the ‘fire-trap’ meeting room gave him claustrophobia.”
― Stuart Kells, The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders

“A woman spent about ten minutes looking around the shop, then told me that she was a retired librarian. I suspect she thought that this was some sort of a bond between us. Not so. On the whole, booksellers dislike librarians. To realise a good price for a book, it has to be in decent condition, and there is nothing librarians like more than taking a perfectly good book and covering it with stamps and stickers before – and with no sense of irony – putting a plastic sleeve over the dust jacket to protect it from the public. The final ignominy for a book that has been in the dubious care of a public library is for the front free endpaper to be ripped out and a ‘DISCARD’ stamp whacked firmly onto the title page, before it is finally made available for members of the public to buy in a sale. The value of a book that has been through the library system is usually less than a quarter of one that has not.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Bring 'em in stupid, send them away clever, that's the UU way!”
― Terry Pratchett, A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devilish Devices

“The food crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in the hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“This was the foreman—a boiler-maker by trade—a good worker. He was a lank, bony, yellow-faced man, with big intense eyes. His aspect was worried, and his head was as bald as the palm of my hand; but his hair in falling seemed to have stuck to his chin, and had prospered in the new locality, for his beard hung down to his waist.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“In reality, there were as many disgruntled reservists and brassed-off regulars on Gloucester Hill as in any other unit of 29 Brigade. It was this that made their fate and their performance the more moving: they were a typical, perhaps a little above average county battalion, who showed for the thousandth time in the history of the British Army what ordinary men, decently led, can achieve in a situation which demands, above all, a willingness for sacrifice.”
― Max Hastings, The Korean War

“Women in Deadwood were few, and no better than they needed to be. Most of them lived in a house called the Cricket, down at the end of the south bend, where they plied their trade under the cold watchful eye of Mrs. Marshall, who smoked opium and owned the house. Others were independent, like Calamity Jane, who in recent weeks had made a great show of mourning the death of Bill Hickok, much to the disgust of Hickok’s friends. Calamity Jane was so masculine she often wore a soldier’s uniform and traveled undetected with the boys in blue, giving them service in the field; she had gone with Custer’s 7th Cavalry on more than one occasion. But she was so male that she often boasted that “give me a dildo in the dark, and no woman can tell me from a true man.” As one observer noted, this left Jane’s appeal somewhat obscure.”
― Michael Crichton, Dragon Teeth

“23 From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!” 24 He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys. 25 And he went on to Mount Carmel and from there returned to Samaria.”
― Anonymous

“I have no belief in luck. I am not superstitious, but it is impossible, when you have reached forty and are conspicuously unsuccessful, not sometimes to half-believe in a malign providence.”
― Graham Greene, Loser Takes All

“There is a quiet sort of Australian man who, in obscurity, achieves great things for which a few people are eternally grateful; he then fades away unsung and is soon forgotten.You can see him on weekends tinkering in his shed, or sanding a little boat, or pursuing an odd hobby. He does his duty, fails with dignity and, when he succeeds, succeeds without trumpeting his success. He is remote, and self-absorbed, and is liked by his grandchildren. His life is one of ceaseless curiosity within his chosen field, of which he is a supreme expert. He is scarcely comprehensible to women — one of whom, tolerating his self-absorption, rewards his devotion and loyalty with her unstinting love. 'Silent' Cyril Clowes, commander at Milne Bay, seems to have been such a man.”
― Paul Ham, Kokoda

“He tried his luck again, and things went so smoothly that with no more noise or disturbance than the last time, he found himself rid of the burden that had caused him so much grief. But since Don Quixote had a sense of smell as acute as his hearing, and Sancho was joined so closely to him, and the vapors rose up almost in a straight line, some unavoidably reached his nostrils, and as soon as they did he came to the assistance of his nostrils and squeezed them closed between two fingers, and in a somewhat nasal voice, he said: “It seems to me, Sancho, that you are very frightened.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“So even if you got it loaded it could not be anything more than a study in still-life until you took the jacks away, and then the scrap metal wouldn't be funny.”
― Paul Brickhill, The Dam Busters

“Like so many men he had found that he had only one or two ideas - that his little collection of pamphlets now in its fiftieth German edition contained the germ of all he would ever think or know.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“We can't stop here, this is bat country!”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“You're blessed with a naivety that borders on stupidity.”
― Alexis Jenni, L'Art français de la guerre

“The commander went, as they say in Ankh-Morpork, totally Librarian on them.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“No wine can be regarded as unimportant, my friend, since the marriage at Cana.”
― Graham Greene, Monsignor Quixote

“The Lord is my shepherd." But if we are sheep why in heaven's name should we trust our shepherd? He's going to guard us from the wolves all right, oh yes, but only so that he can sell us later to the butcher.”
― Graham Greene, Monsignor Quixote

“Suiffy, have you ever felt a sort of strange emptiness in the heart? A sort of aching void of the soul?'

'Oh, rather!'

'What do you do about it?'

'I generally take a couple of cocktails.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Doctor Sally

“Jim said that bees won't sting idiots, but I didn't believe that, because I tried them lots of times myself and they wouldn't sting me.”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“Despite these warnings, the Great powers’ arsenals were brimful; their ranks, swollen. In this light, to suggest they groped or sleepwalked blindly into a battle not of their making is nonsense. To many politicians and commanders, the coming war was seen as necessary; some relished it as noble and desirable. To most, it was regarded as inevitable.”
― Paul Ham, 1913: The Eve of War

“The less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

“Food for the native Ewoks.”
― Chuck Wendig, Aftermath

“It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front