Thus Was Adonis Murdered Quotes

“On my first day in London I made an early start. Reaching the Public Record Office not much after ten, I soon secured the papers I needed for my research and settled in my place. I became, as is the way of the scholar, so deeply absorbed as to lose all consciousness of my surroundings or of the passage of time. When at last I came to myself, it was almost eleven and I was quite exhausted: I knew I could not prudently continue without refreshment.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“Julia's unhappy relationship with the Inland Revenue was due to her omission, during four years of modestly successful practice at the Bar, to pay any income tax. The truth is, I think, that she did not, in her heart of hearts, really believe in income tax. It was a subject which she had studied for examinations and on which she had thereafter advised a number of clients: she naturally did not suppose, in these circumstances, that it had anything to do with real life.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“I had already established, as you know, that it was logically impossible for Kenneth to be distressed by anything that might occur between Ned and myself; but Kenneth, being an artist, has perhaps not studied logic and is unaware of the impossibility.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“Julia did very well,' said Selena, 'not to fall into the lagoon. How beastly of that woman to suggest she'd had too much to drink.'
'Most uncharitable,' said Ragwort. 'Julia, as we all know, needs no assistance from alcohol to make her trip over things.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“I would think it odd, he said, that he had never married. I did not, in fact, think it at all odd--the statistical chances against any woman being prepared to endure both the hairiness of his legs and the tedium of his conversation seemed to be negligible. I did not express this view, but said sympathetically that the military life must be difficult to combine with the domestic.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“If you're going to go and buy a load of stolen goods, you can't take a whole crowd of friends with you. The presence of third parties reduces the prospective seller to a clamlike condition.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“Eleanor was charming. That is to say, her manner seemed designed to merit that description: she displayed towards us a sort of girlish archness, such as a doting father might have found captivating in an only daughter at the age of eight. The effect was as of attempting to camouflage an armored tank by icing it with pink sugar: stratagem doomed to failure.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“I now realize that to see the Major when he isn't really there must at least be preferable to seeing him when he really is there.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“I began to be very worried about Desdemona. We are given to understand that Othello's courtship of her consisted almost entirely of stories beginning "When I was stationed among the Anthropophagi—" or "I must tell you about a funny thing that happened during the siege of Rhodes." The dramatist Shakespeare would have us believe that she not only put up with this but actually enjoyed it: can that great connoisseur of the human heart really have thought this possible?”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“Indeed, it is a benevolent dispensation of Providence that those who express most dread of an unorthodox advance are usually those whom Nature has most effectively protected from any risk of one.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“You do not seem to appreciate the intensity of Julia’s feelings towards the Department of Inland Revenue. She is under the impression that it is a vast conspiracy having as its sole objective her physical, mental and financial ruin.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“she did not, in her heart of hearts, really believe in income tax. It was a subject which she had studied for examinations and on which she had thereafter advised a number of clients: she naturally did not suppose, in these circumstances, that it had anything to do with real life.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“My mind was a little distracted from these anxieties by our encountering a singularly beautiful girl. I should mention, perhaps, lest I be thought in any wat to have misled my readers, that her figure was pudgy, her complexion sallow and her hair a rather drab shade of brown. These possible defects, however, pass unnoticed in a young woman whose expression is that of a medieval saint after a particularly satisfactory vision of the Eternal City.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“...attachment of great intensity and passion, such as one rarely sees. One could not wish, for oneself or for one's friends, any first-hand experience of such extremity of feeling - it is not conducive to comfortable living. And yet there is about it, when observed, something curiously touching and attractive, so that one almost, absurdly, regrets one's own inability to entertain it.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“One doesn't like to appear vulgarly inquisitive. But if everyone one knows has suddenly started murdering everyone else, it would be terribly nice to know about it.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered