The Avenging Saint Quotes

“I hope I never live to see the day when the miserable quibbling hair-splitters have won the earth, and there’s no more black and white, but everything’s just a dreary relative grey, and every one has a right to his own damned heresies, and it’s more noble to be broad-minded about your disgusting neighbours than to push their faces in as a preliminary to yanking them back into the straight and narrow way .”
― Leslie Charteris, The Avenging Saint

“We’ve had enough of war. Fighting is for the strong – for those who know what they’re fighting for, and love the fight for its own sake. We were like that, my friends and I – and yet we swore that it should not happen again. Not this new fighting – not this cold-blooded scientific maiming and slaughter of schoolboys and poor grown-up fools herded to squalid death to make money for a bunch of slimy financiers. We saw it coming again. The flags flying, and the bands playing, and the politicians yaddering about a land fit for heroes to live in, and the poor fools cheering and being cheered, and another madness, worse than the last. Just another war to end war”
― Leslie Charteris, The Avenging Saint

“Simon Templar, with the old careless swashbuckling days behind him, more stern and sober, playing bigger games than he had ever touched before – yet with the light of all the old ideals in blue eyes that would never grow old, and all the old laughing hell-for-leather recklessness waiting for his need.”
― Leslie Charteris, The Avenging Saint

“first published by Hodder & Stoughton in October 1930 with an American hardback appearing”
― Leslie Charteris, The Avenging Saint

“the squat black shape of a small hangar. They reached it in a few more strides, and the Saint pulled back the sliding doors. And the aeroplane was there—a Gipsy Moth in silver and gold, with its wings demurely folded. “Isn’t this our evening?” drawled the Saint.”
― Leslie Charteris, The Avenging Saint

“Then he climbed into the front cockpit and plugged his telephones into the rubber connection. His voice boomed through the speaking tube. “All set, Roger?” “All set.”
― Leslie Charteris, The Avenging Saint

“My God in Heaven!” said the Saint huskily. “Then there’s all hell let loose tonight!” 3 “Is it as bad as that, sir?” inquired the constable weakly, and Simon swung round on him like a tiger. “You blistered boob!” he snarled. “D’you think this is my idea of being comic?” And then he checked himself. That sort of thing wouldn’t do any good.”
― Leslie Charteris, The Avenging Saint

“He told her of outlandish places that he had seen, of bad men that he had met, of forlorn ventures in which he had played his part, and yet it was nothing like a detailed autobiography that he gave her—it was a kaleidoscope, an irresponsibly shredded panorama of a weird and wonderful life, strewn extravagantly under her eyes as only the Saint himself could have strewn it, seasoned with his own unique spice of racy allusion and flippant phrase, and it was out of this squandered prodigality of inconsequent reminiscence, and the gallant manner of its telling, that she put together her picture of the man.”
― Leslie Charteris, The Avenging Saint

“made Dr Voronoff’s best experiment look like a piffled porcupine trying to play the Fifth Symphony on a cracked oboe in a pail of molasses.”
― Leslie Charteris, The Avenging Saint