Frank > Frank's Quotes

“Mr Greenleaf was such a decent fellow himself, he took it for granted that everybody else in the world was decent, too. Tom had almost forgotten such people existed.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“We're all in the game. We all drive cars, and we're all hooked on oil. The question is how we can get unhooked before we drown in the stuff.”
― Ross Macdonald, Sleeping Beauty

“I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it ourselves.”
― Ross Macdonald, Sleeping Beauty

“For a man as keen as he on getting into bed with women, keeping hidden the full enormity of his fatness was a chronic problem. Its most acute form naturally came up when someone new had to be hustled or cajoled past the point of no return. That point tended to get later and later as his belly waxed.”
― Kingsley Amis, One Fat Englishman

“Zo beschrijft hij hoe wijlen burgemeester Bicket het voordelige ambt van vendumeester -- goed voor zesduizend gulden per jaar -- toeschoof aan zijn veertienjarige zoontje Hendrick. Het burgemeesterszoontje Jan Corver Trip was zelfs al op zijn vijfde jaar postmeester op Rotterdam, Delft en Den Haag. Toen hij acht was maakte zijn vader hem postmeester van het Hamburgse Postcomptoir. Toen hij achttien was, werd hij ook nog kerkmeester van de Nieuwe Walenkerk. Toen hij op zijn negentiende overleed -- hij had een leren riem te strak en te lang om zijn lijf geklemd om zijn overtollige vet te camoufleren, waardoor 'zijne edele's partijen, long en lever aan malkander waren gegroeid' -- liet hij een vermogen na van twee ton.”
― Geert Mak, Amsterdam

“The body is the inescapable factor, you see. You can keep in good shape for what you are, but radical change is impossible. Health isn't making everybody into a Greek ideal; it's living out the destiny of the body.”
― Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

“Men telde drie verschijningen: de storm, de walvis en de heilige op de hondenkar. Volgens sommigen echter waren het er vier: de storm, de walvis, de heilige en de overstroming. Anderen kwamen tot vijf of zes of zeven -- en zo viel de waarheid in veelheid uiteen.”
― P.F. Thomése, Zuidland

“What seemed delicacy in him was usually a way of avoiding trouble; what seemed like sympathy was the instinct to prevent trouble before it started. It was hard to see what growing older would mean to such a person. His emotions, from lack of exercise, had disappeared almost altogether. Adaptability and curiosity, he had found, did just as well.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop

“Florence had noticed one or two eccentricities in herself lately, which might be the result of hard work, or of age, or of living alone. When the letters came, for example, she often found herself wasting time in looking at the postmarks and wondering whoever they could be from, instead of opening them in a sensible manner and finding out at once.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop

“Surely you have to succeed, if you give everything you have.'
'I don't see why. Everyone has to give everything they have eventually. They have to die. Dying can't be called a success.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop

“Next she lost her belief in the sincerity of those about her. She secretly refused to believe that anyone (herself excepted) loved anyone. All families lived in a wasteful atmosphere of custom and kissed one another with secret indifference. She saw that the people of this world moved about in an armour of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires.”
― Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

“Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.”
― Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

“She often appeared at my chambers to talk over his lapses; for if, as she declared, she had washed her hands of him, she had carefully preserved the water of this ablution, which she handed about for analysis.”
― Henry James, The Coxon Fund

“Verder ken ik 'r een, die is uit Oss afkomstig; nou, meneer weet hoe 't dáár toegaat, in Oss, daar vermoorden ze hun eigen vader als ze jarig zijn. Hij heeft me wel 's verteld uit z'n jeugd, hoe de jongens erop uitgingen, op winteravonden, om ieder die ze tegenkwamen, en 't hoefden niet eens vijanden te zijn, met hun kop in 'n plas te houden tot ze gestikt waren. Alleen maar voor de lol. Dat soort lui pleegt 'n moord zoals u uw neus snuit...”
― Simon Vestdijk, Pastorale 1943

“It is true of course, that I have a will of iron, but it can be switched off if the circumstances seem to demand it.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves in the Morning

“One prefers, of course, on all occasions to be stainless and above reproach, but, failing that, the next best thing is unquestionably to have got rid of the body.”
― p g wodehouse

“There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, 'Do trousers matter?'"
"The mood will pass, sir.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

“It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can't help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves in the Morning

“A man can spend his whole existence never learning the simple lesson that he has only one life and that if he fails to do what he wants with it, nobody else really cares.--Louis Auchincloss”
― Louis Auchincloss

“That propensity of lifting every problem from the plane of the understandable by means of some sort of mystic expression, is very Russian. I knew her well enough to have discovered her scorn for all the practical forms of political liberty known to the western world. I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a terrible corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naive and hopeless cynicism. I think sometimes that the psychological secret of the profound difference of that people consists in this, that they detest life, the irremediable life of the earth as it is, whereas we westerners cherish it with perhaps an equal exaggeration of its sentimental value. But this is a digression indeed....”
― Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

“Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths. You make out To Do lists - reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself - slices of ice-cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.

People like Sheba think that they know what it's like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new. Or the week they spent in a Bavarian steel town when they were fifteen years old, visiting their greasy-haired German pen pal and discovering that her hand-writing was the best thing about her. But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing, to the ground. About all of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“The absorbed, disapproving regard of the middle-aged woman for her own face disappeared as he came up. ('The Snow Heart')”
― Elspeth Davie

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”
― Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel

“He would make a lovely corpse.”
― Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit

“When I first met him, he had a recurrent nightmare that Henry Kissinger was chasing him with a knife, and I said it was really his father, and he said it was really Henry Kissinger, and I said it was his father and he said it was Henry Kissinger, and this went on for months until he started going to the Central American shrinkette, who said Henry Kissinger was really his younger sister.”
― Nora Ephron, Heartburn

“From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.”
― Groucho Marx

“The weather being hot, he had no cravat, and wore his shirt collar wide open; so that every time he spoke something was seen to twitch and jerk up in his throat, like the little hammers in a harpsichord when the notes are struck. Perhaps it was the Truth feebly endeavouring to leap to his lips. If so, it never reached them.”
― Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit

“I've had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.”
― Groucho Marx

“Who shot him? I asked.
The grey man scratched the back of his neck and said: Somebody with a gun.”
― Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest