Posted by Cori on April 28th, 2007 — Posted in Quotes from Books
My main feeling at the Durbar while I watched those splendid beasts–the crowds of camels, the crowds of elephants–all being driven along by the little, faint, dreamy, sleepy-looking people was, “Why don’t their elephants turn around on them and chase them?”I kept thinking at first that they would, almost any minute.
Our elephants chase us–most of us. Who has not seen locomotives coming quietly out of their roundhouses in New York and begin chasing people, chasing whole towns, tearing along with them, making everybody hurry whether or no, speeding up and ordering around by the clock great cities, everybody alike, the rich and the poor, the just and the unjust, for hundreds of miles around? In the same way I have seen, hundreds of times, motor cars turning around on their owners and chasing them–chasing them fairly out of their lives. And hundreds of thousands of little wood-and-rubber Things with nickel bells whirring, may be seen ordering around people–who pay them for it–in any city of our modern world.
Now and then one comes on a man who keeps a telephone, who is a gentleman with it, and who keeps it in its place, but not often.
Crowds: Gerald Stanley Lee (1913).
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Posted by Cori on April 21st, 2007 — Posted in Quotes from Books
On one of these occasions, when Johnny [Gillat] was engaged in making peace between two little girls—little girls were his specialty—the rector met him and it was then it occurred to him that Mr. Gillat might help in the school. It was not much of an honour, the school was in rather a bad way just now, and boasted no other teachers than the rector and a raspy-tempered girl of sixteen, but Johnny was much flattered. He thought he ought to refuse; he was quite sure he could not teach; the idea of his doing so was certainly new and strange; he was also sure he was not virtuous enough. But in the end he was persuaded to try; Julia told him that he might hear the catechism with an open book, choose the Bible tales he was surest of, to read and explain, and have his class of little girls to tea very often.
The Good Comrade, by Una L. Silberrad, 1907.
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Posted by Cori on April 14th, 2007 — Posted in Quotes from Books
The Charivaria section of the Punch magazine is always good for a little amusement, as it pops out pithy comments and witty one-liners each week, based on news of the week previous (here, 3rd Nov, 1920). If t’were written now, it would be one of those emails people forward round the office on a Monday afternoon, even though it’s not all that funny.
Found under a bed in a strange house at Grimsby, a man told the police who arrested him that he was looking for work. It was pointed out to him that the usual place for men looking for work is in bed, not under it.
A small boy, born in a Turkish harem, is said to have forty-eight step-mothers living. Our office-boy, however, is still undefeated in the matter of recently defunct grandmothers.
From an account of Sir J. FORBES-ROBERTSON’S début:–
“It was interesting to remember that in the audience on that occasion were Dante, Gabriel, Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne.”–Provincial Paper.
The archangel was a great catch.
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Posted by Cori on April 7th, 2007 — Posted in Quotes from Books
Colonel Bellairs looked at him with the suspicion which appears to be the one light shadow that lies across the sunny life of the bore.
“I said so half an hour ago,” he remarked severely, “when we were inspecting my new manure tanks, and you said you did not notice it.”
“You were right all the same,” said the younger man.
What an interest would be added to life if it were possible to ascertain how many thousands of times people like Colonel Bellairs are limply assured that they are in the right! The mistake of statistics is that they are always compiled on such dull subjects. Who cares to know how many infants are born, and how many deaf mutes exist? But we should devour statistics, we should read nothing else if only they dealt with matters of real interest: if they recorded how often Mr. Simpson, the decadent poet, had said he was “a child of nature,” how often, if ever, the Duchess of Inveraven and Mr. Brown, the junior curate at Salvage-on-Sea, had owned they had been in the wrong; whether it was true that an Archbishop had ever really said “I am sorry” without an “if” after it, and, if so, on what occasion; and whether any novelist exists who has not affirmed at least five hundred times that criticism is a lost art.
Prisoners, fast bound in misery and iron, Mary Cholmondeley (1906)
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