Tim > Tim's Quotes

“Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all my ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”
― W.B. Yeats

“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“When one is much alone one’s vision becomes more extensive; from the tide-wrack rubbish-heap of small bones and dry, crumpled wings, relics of lesser lives, rise images the brighter for being unconfined by the physical eye. From some feathered mummy, stained and thin, soars the spinning lapwing in the white March morning; in the surface crust of rotting weed, where the foot explodes a whirring puff of flies, the withered fins and scales hold still, intrinsically, the sway and dart of glittering shoals among the tide-swung sea-tangle; smothered by the mad parabolic energy of leaping sand-hoppers the broken antlers of a stag re-form and move again high in the bare, stony corries and the October moonlight.”
― Gavin Maxwell, Ring of Bright Water

“We are so numerous that we are starving. Therefore we must encourage still larger families so as to become yet more numerous and starving. When we are so numerous and starving as all that, obviously we shall have a right to take other people’s stores of seed. Besides, we shall by then have a numerous and starving army.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“And in his customary corner, the awesome Rocker, Superintendent of Police, ex-Palestine, ex-Kenya, ex-Malaya, ex-Fiji, an implacable warhorse with a beer, one set of slightly reddened knuckles, and a weekend copy of the South China Morning Post.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Their mother is Athene, the goddess of wisdom, and, although they are often ready to play the buffoon to amuse you, such conduct is the prerogative of the truly wise.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Yes, well, I always assume that businessmen are crooks, don't you, Harry? I'm sure we all do.”
― John le Carré, A Perfect Spy

“Every professor of philosophy needs a nine-year-old daughter. Mine has a habit of saying, "Daddy, that is a very silly idea." She is always right.”
― Grayling A. C.

“Perhaps that is the true definition of pragmatism – an ability to deceive oneself and so turn one’s back on principle, law or custom if they stand in the way of what one wants.”
― Julian Rathbone, The Last English King

“The Destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Only fools want to be great.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“You run a grave risk, my boy," said the magician, "of being turned into a piece of bread, and toasted.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Love is a trick played on us by the forces of evolution. Pleasure is the bait laid down by the same. There is only power. Power is of the individual mind but the mind's power is not enough. Power of the body decides everything in the end and only might is right.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“I never could stomach these nationalists,’ he exclaimed. ‘The destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“My boy, you shall be everything in the world, animal, vegetable, mineral, protista, or virus, for all I care-before I have done with you-but you will have to trust my superior backsight. The time is not yet ripe for you to be a hawk... so you may as well sit down for the moment and learn to be a human being.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“There were thousands of brown books in leather bindings, some chained to the book-shelves and others propped against each other as if they had had too much to drink and did not really trust themselves. These gave out a smell of must and solid brownness which was most secure.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“He thought himself awake when he was already asleep. He saw the stars above his face, whirling on their silent and sleepless axis, and the leaves of the trees rustling against them, and he heard small changes in the grass. These little noises of footsteps and soft-fringed wing-beats and stealthy bellies drawn over the grass blades or rattling against the bracken at first frightened or interested him, so that he moved to see what they were (but never saw), then soothed him, so that he no longer cared to see what they were but trusted them to be themselves, and finally left him altogether as he swam down deeper and deeper, nuzzling into the scented turf, into the warm ground, into the unending waters under the earth.”
― T.H. White

“They would set their course toward it, seeing it grow bigger silently and imperceptibly, a motionless growth--and then, when they were at it, when they were about to bang their noses with a shock against its seeming solid mass, the sun would dim. Wraiths of mist suddenly moving like serpents of the air would coil about them for a second. Grey damp would be around them, and the sun, a copper penny, would fade away. The wings next to their own wings would shade into vacancy, until each bird was a lonely sound in cold annihilation, a presence after uncreation. And there they would hang in chartless nothing, seemingly without speed or left or right or top or bottom, until as suddenly as ever the copper penny glowed and the serpents writhed.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“The miracle was that he had been allowed to do a miracle. And ever, says Mallory, Sir Lancelot wept, as he had been a child that had been beaten.”
― T.H. White

“So we may well believe that the King's men were shriven on the night before they fought. Something of the young man's vision had penetrated to his captains and his soldiers. Something of the new ideal of the Round Table which was to be born in pain, something about doing a hateful and dangerous action for the sake of decency--for they knew that the fight was to be fought in blood and death without reward. They would get nothing but the unmarketable conscience of having done what they ought to do in spite of fear--something which wicked people have often debased by calling it glory with too much sentiment, but which is glory all the same. This idea was in the hearts of the young men who knelt before the God-distributing bishops--knowing that the odds were three to one, and that their own warm bodies might be cold at sunset.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“As for you, Man, you will be a naked tool all your life, though a user of tools. You will look like an embryo till they bury you, but all the others will be embryos before your might. Eternally undeveloped, you will always remain potential in Our image, able to see some of Our sorrows and to feel some of Our joys. We are partly sorry for you, Man, but partly hopeful. Run along then, and do your best.”
― T. H. White, The Sword in the Stone

“What are you doing in there, for Christ’s sake?’ Jerry yelled. ‘What goes on?’ Perhaps he’s having a pee, he thought absurdly. Slowly the door opened. Craw’s gravity was awesome. ‘They haven’t come out,’ said Jerry. He had the feeling of not reaching Craw at all. He was going to repeat himself in fact, loudly. He was going to dance about and make a damn scene. So that Craw’s answer, when it finally came, came just in time. ‘To the contrary, my son.’ The old boy took a step forward and Jerry could see the films now, hanging behind him like black wet worms from Craw’s little clothes line, pink pegs holding them in place. ‘To the contrary, sir,’ he said, ‘every frame is a bold and disturbing masterpiece.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“If you buy people,’ old Sambo used to say, ‘buy them thoroughly”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“curry plays a nostalgic, retrogressive role in British culinary culture; the proliferation of restaurants specializing in it is a consolation prize for the loss of world-historical consequence; we are to be understood as having given away the Empire and received in return, in delayed settlement of that very considerable invoice, the street-corner tandoori house.”
― John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure

“I was a wood-nymph. But I got pursued by a prince, not a nice prince, the other kind, and, well, you’d think a prince, even the wrong kind, would understand about boundaries, wouldn’t you?’ ‘You would?”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“Some human faults are military virtues, like stupidity, and arrogance, and narrow-mindedness.”
― George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman

“I disliked Scotland and the Scots; the place I found wet and the people rude. They had the fine qualities which bore me – thrift and industry and long-faced holiness, and the young women are mostly great genteel boisterous things who are no doubt bedworthy enough if your taste runs that way. (One acquaintance of mine who had a Scotch clergyman’s daughter described it as like wrestling with a sergeant of dragoons.) The men I found solemn, hostile, and greedy, and they found me insolent, arrogant, and smart.”
― George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman

“(It might now be the occasion to remember that for the Romans, a barbarian was someone who wore trousers, had a beard and ate butter.)”
― John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure

“In Polish, the language of Poland, all green vegetables are known as włoszczyzna, which means ‘things Italian”
― John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure

“Magpies too,’ said Leslie; ‘awful thieves, magpies.’ Larry took a hundred-drachma note from his pocket and waved it over the babies, and they immediately shot their heads skywards, necks wavering, mouths gaping, wheezing and bubbling frantically. Larry jumped back hastily. ‘You’re right, by God!’ he exclaimed excitedly. ‘Did you see that? They tried to attack me and get the money!’ ‘Don’t be ridiculous, dear; they’re only hungry,’ said Mother. ‘Nonsense, Mother … you saw them leap at me, didn’t you? It’s the money that did it … even at that age they have criminal instincts. He can’t possibly keep them; it will be like living with Arsène Lupin.”
― Gerald Durrell, The Corfu Trilogy