Rob > Rob's Quotes

“When the French come over, May we meet them at Dover!”
― Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood

“Love is like a tree: it grows by itself, roots itself deeply in our being and continues to flourish over a heart in ruin. The inexplicable fact is that the blinder it is, the more tenacious it is. It is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable.”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

“The problem with trains in the winter is that there only seem to be two heat settings, and they tend to be 'Off' and 'Surface of the Sun'. Today it's been set to the latter.   As”
― Andy Leeks, As They Slept

“Sic transit gloria mundi.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Above his monotonous voice one could hear, now and again, a little wind stray through the drying leaves of the trees. A leaf or two might flutter down, and scratch against the bark of trunk or boughs with a crackling papery rustle.”
― Frederic Manning, Her Privates We

“Nonsense! If you want to do it, you can do it. The question is, do you want to do it?”
― Nellie Bly, Around the World in Seventy-Two Days

“SPQR takes its title from another famous Roman catchphrase, Senatus PopulusQue Romanus, ‘The Senate and People of Rome’.”
― Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

“The wrecked town of Gaza lay silent and empty. It had once been among the finest cities of the Near East: a stopping point on the coastal road from Syria through Palestine to Egypt, made rich by a thriving market and renowned for its mosques, churches and massive airy houses built in marble.1 But in 1149 only its natural wells and reservoirs remained to indicate that this was once a place where people of many religions had thrived. War had swept through the elegant streets and emptied Gaza, seemingly for good. ‘It was now in ruins’, wrote William of Tyre, ‘and entirely uninhabited.”
― Dan Jones, The Templars: The Rise and Fall of God's Holy Warriors

“Principium fini solet impar sepe uidere ‘Often the end fails to equal the beginning”
― Dan Jones, The Templars: The Rise and Fall of God's Holy Warriors

“understand. Self-preservation should, quite rightly, eclipse any amorous feelings she harbours for me,” Varro argued, as he anxiously played with some dice in his hand and shuffled a little, in an attempt to sit more comfortably on the bench. He often carried the ivory, gold-spotted dice in his hands when he went out into the garden, read in the library or drank in the house. Sometimes he would practise rolling them, as he tried to devise a system of securing the score he desired. Just when he thought he had mastered a technique he would then throw several scores counter to his wishes. Good luck runs through one’s hands quicker than sand or water. The corners were becoming rounded and the gold was beginning to fade on the dice. But still he played on.  “Do you think it’s for the best, to send her away?” “I dare”
― Richard Foreman, Blood & Honour

“I’ve never really responded to peer pressure. What I do respond to, however, is someone categorically telling me I can’t do something. I trill at the sound of a gauntlet going down. It feels like a dare. And I’ve never been able to resist a dare.”
― Sue Perkins, Spectacles

“The man sitting alone so silent and strong So what if you’re attracted for all the wrong reasons So what if your reasoning’s wrong Call his indifference mystery Call his arrogance intellect All you’ve got to lose is your heart And a little self-respect. If you’ve got arrogance and indifference You can make them pay They’re the most commercial product On the romantic market today.”
― Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist

“Don’t offer me love I seek disinterest and denial Tenderness makes my skin crawl Understanding is vile When you offer me happiness You offer too much My ideal is a long-lasting longing For someone whom I cannot quite touch”
― Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist

“I confide in everyone. I have no restricted private self, reserved specifically for certain trusted special people. I trust and mistrust anyone. I have traveled a full circle. But this time, on returning to zero again, I am able to act out the mistake more adeptly. I am on my way to becoming a very skilled loser. A specialist, a loser to end all losers. A flair for failing. I do it with style and finesse.”
― Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist

“I act like someone in a bomb shelter trying to raise everyone’s spirits.”
― Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist

“I WOULD LIKE to not be able to hear myself think. I constantly hear my mind chattering and jabbering away up there all by itself. I wish it would give me a fucking break. Write, don’t think, write. You’re not thinking properly, Ms. Fisher, I suggest you write. If anyone reads this when I have passed to the big bad beyond I shall be posthumorously embarrassed. I shall spend my entire afterlife blushing.”
― Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist

“She: One of us is boring. He: Why do you say that? She: Because … well, we’re just sitting here, not talking. He: What’s wrong with that? She: Well, I don’t know. Probably nothing—it’s just that we don’t need each other for it. He: For what? She: Being quiet.”
― Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist

“I wish I could go away somewhere but the only problem with that is that I’d have to go, too.”
― Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist

“How can you say that?’ said Rudi. ‘Just look at him, Karl. Can you not see that he’s something special? This one isn’t just any old horse. There’s a nobility in his eye, a regal serenity about him. Does he not personify all that men try to be and never can be? I tell you, my friend, there’s divinity in a horse, and specially in a horse like this. God got it right the day he created them.”
― Michael Morpurgo, War Horse

“All cats are grey. This pithy little saying originates from John Heywood’s book of proverbs, published in 1546: ‘When all candles be out, all cats be grey.”
― Sue Perkins, Spectacles

“If there’s one thing I hate more than trophy killing, it’s taxidermy. You’ve killed it. Don’t take the piss. Don’t fill it with sand and make it play poker with a load of animals that it would have made mincemeat of in the wild, for God’s sake.”
― Sue Perkins, Spectacles

“What was that Poe quote that Lydia liked so much? I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity. The ducks and the pond are well behind me now.”
― Julia Heaberlin, Black-Eyed Susans

“English was a complex hybrid of Anglo-Saxon and Norse, with a strong overlay of Norman-French, and was difficult for outsiders to learn fluently because of its consequent lack of linguistic logic.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cromwell: A Life

“Having begun their protest by demanding that the realm should be governed only by ‘native-born men’, the opposition now insisted on nothing less than the total expulsion of all foreigners, ‘never to return’.”
― Marc Morris, A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain

“By then tensions were rising in Palestine. Almost exactly twenty-five years earlier, in the hope of creating what it called ‘a buffer Jewish state’ to guard the eastern approaches to the Suez Canal and keep the French at bay, the British government of the day had issued the Balfour Declaration, named after the then foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour. This pledged support for a Jewish national home in Palestine so long as it did not impinge on the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities there. It helped Britain secure the mandate to rule Palestine in 1920.”
― James Barr, Lords of the Desert: Britain's Struggle with America to Dominate the Middle East

“The problem of Palestine’, one British general decided, was ‘the same as the problem of Ireland, namely, two peoples living in a small country hating each other like hell.”
― James Barr, Lords of the Desert: Britain's Struggle with America to Dominate the Middle East

“Only the appointment of yet another prime minister, who declared that he would not pursue membership of the pact, bought an uneasy calm.”
― James Barr, Lords of the Desert: Britain's Struggle with America to Dominate the Middle East

“Our period of occupation did the country little permanent good, for all the selfless work of many devoted Englishmen and so many good intentions.”
― James Barr, Lords of the Desert: Britain's Struggle with America to Dominate the Middle East

“How refreshing it is’, wrote Stauffenberg, ‘to get away from this atmosphere to surroundings where men give of their best without a thought, and give their lives too, without a murmur of complaint, while the leaders and those who should set an example quarrel and quibble about their own prestige, or haven’t the courage to speak their minds on a question which affects the lives of thousands of their fellow men.’ Paulus either did not notice, or more likely he deliberately ignored, the coded message.”
― Antony Beevor, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-1943

“The hour of courage has struck on the clock …’, ran Anna Akhmatova’s poem at that moment when the very existence of Russia appeared to be in mortal danger.”
― Antony Beevor, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-1943