Two Envelopes And A Phone > Two Envelopes And A Phone's Quotes

“Across the Bay, lightning walked on awkward stilts”
― Graham Masterton, Charnel House

“If you think the average law-abiding citizen feels strange finding himself in a cell, imagine how a cop feels. It’s not natural. It’s like a dog being peed on by a lamppost.”
― Charles Alverson, Goodey's Last Stand

“It was so hot the snakes used to get burnt crossing the floor of my hut. it was so hot the mosquitoes turned into fireflies. The kangaroos fainted with the heat. And I was in the middle of it all, hacking away with an axe at the prickly pear, digging with a spade to reach the artesian wells fifty feet below ground - so that the sheep could get a drink. And the nearest pub was ninety-five miles away. It was filled with bearded men who had never seen rain. They carried guns. They shot anyone who tried to make a joke.”
― Margot Bennett, The Man Who Didn't Fly

“God knows!” replied Driver. “It sounds as if someone has been trying to attack Miss Fuller, but you know how mysterious people are when telephoning to the police: they seem to think that the criminal must be lying in a ditch outside the house tapping the wires. It’s all the fault of these crime-books you see on every library shelf. Now that every Tom, Dick, and Harriet has turned to writing about murder...”
― Harriet Rutland, Blue Murder

“Old age ain't no place for sissies.”
― Bette Davis

“They're trying to make us believe we live in the age of "the community," when the individual must perish so that society may live, and we don't want to see that it is society that is dying so the tyrants can live.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

“A startling chain of events had caused this forced emergence of Marston-le-Willows from its pastoral seclusion, its almost mediaeval English passivity and quietude into the hustle and noise of twentieth-century publicity. That chain of events had culminated in a mysterious murder and apparently there are few people who are not immediately interested in a mysterious murder. It is said that even such exalted personages as prime ministers, chancellors of the exchequer, law lords, headmasters of famous schools and secretly a bishop or two are addicted to the reading of fictional murders as an invigorating relaxation from the terrible strain of their stupendous mental activities.”
― Robin Forsythe, The Ginger Cat Mystery

“Ravinel was used to driving at night. He preferred it, for he liked being alone and liked it all the more when tearing through the darkness at top speed. At night there was no need to slow down even at a village. The headlights lit up the road fantastically, making it seem like a canal stirred by a slight swell. Sometimes he could almost imagine he was in a speedboat. Then suddenly it would be like shooting down the slope of a switchback: the white posts bordering the road at the turnings would sweep giddily past, their reflectors glittering like precious stones. It was as if you yourself were conjuring up with a touch of your magic wand this unearthly fairy world, round which was a dim, shadowy void with no horizon. You dream. You leave your earthly flesh behind., to become an astral body gliding through a sleeping universe. Fields, streets, churches, stations. Created on the moment out of nothing and then swept away into nothingness again. A touch of the accelerator is sufficient to destroy them. Perhaps they have never really existed. Mere figments, created by you and lasting no longer than your whim, except, now and again, for an image that stamps itself on your retina like a dead leaf caught on your radiator—yet even that is even no more real than the rest.”
― Boileau-Narcejac, She Who Was No More

“Jeremy walked in a great shrubbery of rhododendrons where Charing Cross Station had been and in a rose-garden over the deep-buried foundations of Scotland Yard.”
― Edward Shanks, The People of the Ruins

“Afterwards he was to discover that there were no displayed mirrors in Utopia; Utopians, he was to learn, thought it indecent to be reminded of themselves in that way. The Utopian method was to scrutinize oneself, see that one was all right and then forget oneself for the rest of the day.”
― H G Wells

“A moment later a second guard approached and whispered to him, after which he said to Lumley-Gotham, "Your son wishes to see you, sir."

"Has he been searched?" inquired Lumley-Gotham.

"He has been searched," said the other.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Millennium: A Comedy of the Year 2000

“It is a week since I arrived in Mecco, and for the first time I have leisure to write up my journal. The life of a Foreign Observer is very strenuous, for the Meccanian method of seeing everything according to programme and timetable is very fatiguing. Already I feel that a holiday will be welcome at the end of my tour. In the whole of this vast city of Mecco there is nothing casual, nothing incidental, nothing unprovided for. Although I am only a spectator, I feel like a little cog in the huge complicated machine. The machine seems to absorb everything; the individual counts for nothing. That is perhaps the reason why it seems impossible to get into contact with any human being other than the officials who instruct me and conduct me every moment of my time. I begin to wonder whether the individual Meccanian really exists, or whether his personality is merged in the official personality which is all that is visible to me.”
― Owen Gregory, Meccania, the Super-State

“It didn’t even seem ironic to him that he should be planning remarks about truth and justice when, in fact, his whole life had been a marathon race, with truth a few jumps ahead of him and justice a few jumps behind. He had never caught up with the one, and the other had never caught up with him.”
― Margaret Millar, A Stranger In My Grave

“Yet he worked unceasingly, amassing a considerable fortune in the process, at turning clients who were indubitably criminals loose upon society. He always assumed that the words from a witness' mouth were perjury, unless he had put them there himself. He expected his friends eventually to double-cross him, and was neither surprised nor hurt when they occasionally did. Yet this did not interfere in the least with his very sincere liking for them.”
― Craig Rice, Eight Faces at Three

“I never came across a neighbourhood so utterly destitute of dead Emilies.”
― Jerome K. Jerome

“That was how it came to pass that the humdrum regulars at a neighbourhood bar on First Avenue were bemused that night by the sudden invasion of an exotic couple - foreigners from Fifth or Park. The woman in a long black velvet coat with lapels of flame-coloured silk. The man with a top hat and one of those white scarves just like something in the movies. More polite than Fifth and Park, First Avenue did not stare or whisper. First is nothing if not tolerant. It will even tolerate the undeserving rich if they are quiet and well-behaved.”
― Helen McCloy

“He had the narrow face and long-legged, hipless figure that Victorian novelists called 'aristocratic'. Basil had seen the same leanness to often in the families of farmers and factory workers to believe that the human bone structure can be altered in a few generations by property and leisure.”
― Helen McCloy, Through a Glass, Darkly

“Robert Darvel, now certain that he had left the planet of his birth and that what he had taken to be a Canadian forest was instead a part of Mars, walked with great strides, as much to revive his sluggish limbs as to reach, as quickly as possible, some Martian settlement, the existence of which he was impatient to discover.”
― Gustave Le Rouge, Prisoner of the Vampires of Mars

“Everything was real except her.”
― Ramsey Campbell, The Parasite

“On Aigburth Road, wind was doing its best to direct the shoppers, but failed to throw Rose under a car. Layer on layer of dark cloud piled up like sediment at the horizon. Against the sky trees glared, bunches of frayed rusty wire. Birds were scraps of light high overhead, in danger of being blown out. Above a church doorway a Virgin and Child were caged by wire netting, which rattled as though they were trying to escape.”
― Ramsey Campbell, The Parasite

“For many years the price of coal and every form of liquid fuel had been clambering to levels that made even the revival of the draft horse seem a practicable possibility, and now with the abrupt relaxation of this stringency, the change in appearance of the traffic upon the world's roads was instantaneous. in three years the frightful armoured monsters that had hooted and smoked and thundered about the world for four awful decades were swept away to the dealers in old metal, and the highways thronged with light and clean and shimmering shapes of silvered steel.”
― H. G. Wells, The World Set Free: Illustrated Edition

“It was high time Ivor got moving. It wasn’t fair to be dead and yet to hang around like this, in every room, in every corner of the house….There ought to be something like a fly-spray, a fly-spray for ghosts, a ghost-spray….”
― Celia Fremlin, The Long Shadow

“The Parliamentary gang Governments, that were then in their last stage of ineptitude, were rotten with the perpetual amendment and weakening of measures, with an endless blocking and barring of projects, with enfeebling bargains and blackmailing concessions. Against every directive body, every party in power, sat another devoting itself to misrepresenting, thwarting, delaying and spoiling, often for no reason or for the flimsiest reasons, merely for the sake of misrepresenting, thwarting, delaying and spoiling, what the governing body was attempting to do, in the hope of degrading affairs to such a pitch of futility as to provoke a change of government that would bring the opposition into power. The opportunities of profit and advancement afforded in such a mental atmosphere to a disingenuous careerist were endless.”
― H. G. Wells

“One looked at people in buses and trains, when their bodies were quiescent and their minds somewhere else, in a book or a newspaper, or behind them at the place they had left, or before them at the place they were going to, and they seemed harmless enough, and so they were while you were looking at them---but what hadn't those apparently tranquil bodies harboured? Souls that had been jealous and angry and afraid and envious, even murderous, and the bodies themselves had been passionate, intemperate, greedy, agonised. People you saw in the buses and trains weren't really themselves at all, only the quiescent ghosts of what they had been, and what they might still be again.”
― F. Tennyson Jesse, A Pin to See the Peepshow

“What could be expected of the members of a government that could not even defend the soil of a neighborhood of Paris? Today it was a fragment of the 19th arrondissement that had disappeared into the abyss; tomorrow it might be the entirety of France! (Loud applause from the extreme left and the benches of the right; the orator, returning to his place, is warmly congratulated.)”
― Jules Lermina, Panic in Paris

“But now the streets were not like the streets she knew. They were so silent: and so empty. On the doorsteps, little groups of milk bottles huddled with their dirty white collars, waiting for the roundsman to collect them next morning and take them off to be washed and spruced up and sent out on duty again… In the areas, the dustbins spilled forth unsightly contents, relentless reminders of man’s mortality: now and again the air still gave a tiny sigh, and a whiff of decay was borne away upon the breeze. The plane trees rustled, whispering a message from the dustbins: ‘All is rottenness, all is death…’, the high street lamps cast shadows in angled walls that seemed as black and bottomless as eternity. A couple reeling home late from a party were swallowed up by a dark doorway: already the glow and the rapture were fading—tomorrow there would be sick headaches and queasy tummies… Beauty vanishes—beauty passes…Only the cats were heedless and unafraid, darting across the patchwork shadows of the streets on plush-cushioned, soundless paws. What threat had death and decay and nothingness?—to a sleek, suave gentleman with nine lives before him and every one packed with adventure that had nothing to do with death—on the contrary!”
― Christianna Brand, Death of Jezebel

“Would not some effort be made to repel the invaders? Surely if we had lost our command of the sea the War Office could, by some means, assemble sufficient men to at least protect London? This was the cry of the wild, turbulent crowd surging through the City and West End, as the blood-red sun sank into the west, flooding London in its warm afterglow--a light in the sky that was prophetic of red ruin and of death to those wildly excited millions.”
― William Le Queux, The Invasion

“I couldn’t answer that one right off the cuff but I remembered an axiom of a C.O. Of mine during the war. “When in doubt—reconnoitre. It doesn’t do the damnedest bit of good but it gives you time to think, and anyhow French words look and sound splendid in all military contexts.” There was possibly a fallacy in his theory because he was eventually killed by a booby-trap while reconnoitring a brothel in Rangoon—but I decided to follow his advice.”
― Berkley Mather

“> The bartender says, "We don't serve time travellers.” > A time traveler walks into a bar.”
― Hudson Moore, The Best Jokes 2016: Ultimate Collection

“There were influences of a wholly unsuspected kind already gathering round the poor vicar, William Wylder; as worlds first begin in thinnest vapour, and whirl themselves in time into consistency and form, so do these dark machinations, which at times gather round unsuspecting mortals as points of revolution, begin nebulously and intangibly, and grow in volume and in density, till a colossal system, with its inexorable tendencies and forces, crushes into eternal darkness the centre it has enveloped.”
― Sheridan Le Fanu, Wylder's Hand: Enriched edition. Unraveling Secrets in 19th-Century Ireland: A Gothic Tale of Deception and the Supernatural