The Singapore Grip Quotes

“I read somewhere that the boatman who rowed King William back across the river after the Battle of the Boyne is supposed to have asked the King which side won … To which the King replied: “What’s it to you? You’ll still be a boatman.”
― J.G. Farrell, The Singapore Grip

“It seems that’s there a ghastly Darwinian principle of economics known as the Law of Substitution which declares, more or less, that “the cheapest will survive”. This has all sorts of unpleasant consequences, one of which is that non-economic values tend to be eliminated.”
― J.G. Farrell, The Singapore Grip

“It is distressing to have to act under the impulsive orders of someone who, in a situation which concerns you deeply, does not know what he is talking about.”
― J.G. Farrell, The Singapore Grip

“A great deal of thought must be given to your daughter's marriage. Otherwise, she will simply slink off like a cat on a dark night to be fertilized under a bush to God knows whom!”
― J.G. Farrell, The Singapore Grip

“Walter, overhearing this, frowned at Dupigny, not because he disbelieved this story, but to indicate that he should speak guardedly in front of the ‘boy’; because if news of the disaster which had befallen Penang, a town which had been British for centuries, should circulate among the natives, what would be the state of their morale? The Major noticed Walter’s frown and knew what he was thinking. But he also knew that Walter’s precaution was futile, for had not Cheong told him of the fall of Penang that morning before anyone else had heard of it? The Major was doubly distressed to think that the Europeans had been evacuated from Penang while the rest of the population had been left to make the best of it. Joan’s”
― J.G. Farrell, The Singapore Grip

“For Dupigny a nation resembled a very primitive human being: this human being consisted of, simply, an appetite and some sort of mechanism for satisfying the appetite. In the case of a nation the appetite was usually, if not quite invariably, economic … (now and again the national vanity which at intervals gripped nations like France and Britain would compel them to some act which made no sense economically: but in this respect, too, they resembled human beings). As for the mechanism for fulfilling the appetite, what was that but a nation’s armed forces? The more powerful the armed forces the better the prospects for satiating the appetite; the more powerful the armed forces the more likely (indeed, inevitable, in Dupigny’s view) that an attempt would be made to satiate it; just as heavyweight boxers are more frequently involved in tavern brawls than, say, dentists, so the very existence of power demands that it should be used. His own failure in Indo-China had merely confirmed him in his cynical views. The League of Nations? Nothing but a pious waste of time! ‘Never”
― J.G. Farrell, The Singapore Grip

“explained that the Committee for International Understanding, with Europe crumbling about it, had closed down in 1940, naturally dismayed by the amount of misunderstanding the outbreak of war entailed.”
― J.G. Farrell, The Singapore Grip

“her”
― J.G. Farrell, The Singapore Grip

“if you were adventurous, scoop out the fragrant, heavenly, alarming flesh of the durian.”
― J.G. Farrell, The Singapore Grip