More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Every intelligent boy of sixteen is a Socialist. At that age one does not see the hook sticking out of the rather stodgy bait.
Peter Kazmaier liked this
The first effect of poverty is that it kills thought. He grasped, as though it were a new discovery› that you do not escape from money merely by being moneyless. On the contrary, you are the hopeless slave of money until you have enough of it to live on—a “competence,” as the beastly middle-class phrase goes.
It is queer how these things happen. You set your face against success, you swear never to Make Good—you honestly believe that you couldn’t Make Good even if you wanted to; and then something happens along, some mere chance, and you find yourself Making Good almost automatically.
He did not want a trained assistant who would expect full wages; he wanted somebody who looked like a gentleman and could talk about books—somebody to impress the more bookish customers. It was the very reverse of a “good” job. The hours were long, the pay was wretched—two pounds a week—and there was no chance of advancement. It was a blind-alley job. And, of course, a blind-alley job was the very thing Gordon was looking for.
No rich man ever succeeds in disguising himself as a poor man; for money, like murder, will out.
Like all rich people, he spent far more time in avoiding human society than in seeking it.
Only at very rare moments could he awake in her the beginnings of physical desire; and these she seemed afterwards to forget, so that he always had to begin at the beginning over again.
Clergymen, he explained to Gordon, so often have good libraries and ignorant widows.
But how absurd that even now, in the era of central heating and tinned peaches, a thousand so-called poets are still writing in the same strain! For what difference does spring or winter or any other time of year make to the average civilised person nowadays? In a town like London the most striking seasonal change, apart from the mere change of temperature, is in the things you see lying about on the pavement.
They had decided that B.O. and halitosis were worked out, or nearly, and had been racking their brains for a long time past to think of some new way of scaring the public.
