Love Lies Bleeding Quotes

“The parents are of the expensive, cocktail-party-and-chromium kind.”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“Boys wandered about in a condition of unnatural civility,”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“He says he went for a walk, and didn’t get home till 11.45. I distrust people,’ Stagge added peevishly, ‘who go for walks at night. It isn’t natural.”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“everyone clapped, in metronomic spasms.”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“the masters, robed, gowned, their attitudes varying from indulgent ennui to virtual coma.”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“And the parents, of course, are aware of this. The fathers come here anxious to look intelligent, amiable and prosperous; the mothers put on their best frocks and hope that their sons’ friends will think them young-looking, attractive, well turned out .”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“I believe that many of the boys have a lurking fear that their parents will disgrace them in some fashion.”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“A Johnsonian portentousness emanated from him.”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“Their squalor, being indescribable, will not be described.”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“The square panes of the small windows were grimy and misanthropic,”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“And everywhere there were parents – parents mouse-like, parents aggressive, parents ostentatious, parents modest, parents subdued, parents animated: a growing rout lured together under the radiant porcelain sky – and for what? the headmaster wondered. It was improbable that they enjoyed themselves. It was improbable, even, that their offspring enjoyed themselves. And yet there was a glamour about it all which stirred the blood, and the headmaster himself, as he contemplated the spectacle, was not immune.”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“Boys were emerging in increasing numbers to greet, guide and control their apprehensive kin.”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“I’m inclined to think,’ said Fen, ‘that neither opposing nor advocating change makes much difference to the sum total of human misery. History suggests that it stays constant in quantity, if not in kind. Science rids us of plague but endows us with the atom bomb. Humanitarianism rids us of sweated labour but offers us the horrors of political agitation in its place. There’s a choice of evils, but that’s all.”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“Heavens, how I detest change! I sometimes think that change, and change alone, is the source of all misery. No doubt Eden was quite static and lethargic.”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“He was a tall, burly, youngish man in plain clothes whose features some freak of heredity had assembled into a perpetual expression of muted alarm, so that to be in his company was like consorting with a man dogged by assassins.”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“Miss Parry was gazing at this scene, in an attempt to dispel the mental indigestion occasioned by reading thirty consecutive essays on the pontificate of Leo X,”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“Soames, for example, who suddenly broke away after twenty years’ teaching and went off to be jokes editor to a firm of matchbox manufacturers.”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“The afternoon wore away.”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“He was a small, stringy man of about fifty, with immense horn-rimmed spectacles, a long, sharp nose, and an unusual capacity for garrulous incoherence.”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“Mr Philpotts was a chemistry master whose principal characteristic lay in a sort of unfocused vehemence,”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“At the north-eastern angle is the chapel, an uncommonly hideous relic of late Victorian times,”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“The main teaching block – a large but comfortless eighteenth-century erection of red brick, ivy-covered and a kind of game reservation for mice”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“the task of instilling Wordsworthian metaphysics into the barren intellects of the Modern Lower Fifth,”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“Simblefield, whose ability to camouflage his ignorance was held in well-justified contempt by the rest of the form,”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“some twenty boys sat behind wilfully collapsible desks, occupying their brief intermission in various more or less destructive and useless ways.”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding

“his reverie merged discouragingly into the austere reality of the classroom.”
― Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding