England Have My Bones Quotes

“I suppose one has to be desperate, to be a successful writer. One has to reach a rock-bottom at which one can afford to let everything go hang. One has got to damn the public, chance one's living, say what one thinks, and be oneself. Then something may come out.”
― T.H. White, England Have My Bones

“Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside”
― t h white, England Have My Bones

“I would recommend a solo flight to all prospective suicides. It tends to make clear the issue of whether one enjoys being alive or not.”
― T.H. White, England Have My Bones

“The best example I know, of this astonishingly stupid attitude towards sport, is that of Franz Ferdinand. His, however, was an achievement with the gun. He used to shoot at Konopist with no less than seven weapons and four loaders, and he once killed more than 4,000 birds, himself, in one day. [A propos of statistics and quite beside the point: a Yorkshireman once drank 52½ pints of beer in one hour.] Now why did Franz Ferdinand do this? Even if he shot for twelve hours at a stretch, without pause for luncheon, it means that he killed six birds in each minute of the day. The mere manual labour, a pheasant every ten seconds for twelve successive hours, is enough to make a road-mender stagger; and there is little wonder that, by the time the unhappy archduke had accumulated his collection of 300,000 head of game, he was shooting with rubber pads on his coat and a bandage round his ears. The unfortunate man had practically stunned himself with gunpowder, long before they bagged him also at Sarajevo.”
― T.H. White, England Have My Bones

“Pets are almost always fatal, to oneself or to them. It
is the curse of possession or motherhood. Mothers ruin their children, choke them like ivy. Dog-lovers steal the souls of their dogs and lose something in exchange. There is an essay on this subject by (I think) Stella Benson called “A Firefly to Steer By.” Everybody ought to read it.”
― T.H. White, England Have My Bones

“A good way of naming a day, is to call it by its wind. 'Wednesday' is an impersonal thing, but days are individual. A great deal more than half their individuality depends upon the wind. A good hunting or fishing diary would do better to have a column in which one wrote, for instance, 'A north-westerly day,' rather than the stupid date.”
― T.H. White, England Have My Bones

“He fancied himself on his humanity towards animals, as so many people do who are inhuman to their fellow men...”
― T.H. White, England Have My Bones