Samuel Pepys Quotes

“The excitement in London gave no guarantees about the future, and he still committed himself to no direct expression of opinion in his Diary.”
― Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

“He has the good reporter’s gift for being in the right place at the right moment, and the structure and rhythm of his sentences show how well he has mastered his medium.”
― Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

“He has the good reporter’s gift for being in the right place at the right moment, and the structure and rhythm of his sentences show how well he has mastered his medium. After”
― Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

“This is businesslike stuff, but he also lets us feel how his own awareness of the importance of the day through which he is living expands and permeates everything as the hours go by:”
― Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

“You can’t read these pages without being moved as Pepys becomes one with the crowd and its excitement and relief at Monck’s determination to break the political deadlock, and at the same time impressed by his capacity to watch, listen and take in everything. The entry may look as though it wrote itself, but the effects are worked with skill, the rhythm of the long unpunctuated sentences leading you through the streets, their momentum occasionally broken by natural pauses to drink, observe or talk. The three pieces of direct speech that do punctuate the passage raise the sense of immediacy, the warning to Haslerig, the greeting to Monck and the ‘God bless them’s of the people to the soldiers.”
― Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

“If we beat the king ninety and nine times, yet he is king still and so will his posterity be after him; but if the king beat us once, we shall all be hanged, and our posterity made slaves.”
― Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

“Pepys was a good scholar, able to read Latin for pleasure all his life; and that very skill may have helped to leave his English free and uncluttered for the Diary, the language of life as opposed to the elaborately constructed formulations of the classroom and study.”
― Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self