Huntingtower Quotes

“The eyes were of a color which he could never decide on, afterwards when he told the story he used to say they were the color of everything in Spring.”
― John Buchan, Huntingtower

“He felt singularly light-hearted, and the immediate cause was his safety razor. A week ago he had bought the thing in a sudden fit of enterprise, and now he shaved in five minutes, where before he had taken twenty, and no longer confronted his fellows, at least one day in three, with a countenance ludicrously mottled by sticking-plaster.”
― John Buchan, Huntingtower

“Romance once more, thinks Dickson . That which has graced the slim throats of princesses in far-away Courts now adorns an elderly matron in a semi-detached villa; the jewels of the wild Nausicaa have fallen to the housewife Penelope. Mrs. McCunn preens herself before the glass.
“I call it very genteel,” she says. “Real stylish. It might be worn by a queen.”
“I wouldn’t say but it has,” says Dickson.”
― John Buchan, Huntingtower

“I have been back among fairy tales,” she says. “I do not quite understand, Alesha. Those gallant little boys! They are youth, and youth is always full of strangeness. Mr. Heritage! He is youth, too, and poetry, perhaps, and a soldier’s tradition. I think I know him... But what about Dickson? He is the petit bourgeois, the épicier, the class which the world ridicules. He is unbelievable.

“No,” is the answer. “You will not find him in Russia. He is what they call the middle-class, which we who were foolish used to laugh at. But he is the stuff which aboveall others makes a great people. He will endure when aristocracies crack and proletariats crumble. In our own land we have never known him, but till we create him our land will not be a nation.”
― John Buchan, Huntingtower

“Sir Archibald looked upon the earnest flushed face of Dickson with admiration. “I’m blessed if you’re not the most whole-hearted brigand I’ve ever struck.”“I’m not. I’m just a business man.”
“Do you realize that you’re levying a private war and breaking every law of the land?”
“Hoots!” said Dickson. “I don’t care a docken about the law. I’m for seeing this job through. What force can you produce?”
“Only cripples , I’m afraid.”
― John Buchan, Huntingtower

“Russia is mortally sick and therefore all evil is unchained, and the criminals have no one to check them. There is crime everywhere in the world, and the unfettered crime in Russia is so powerful that it stretches its hand to crime throughout the globe and there is a great mobilizing everywhere of wicked men. Once you boasted that law was international and that the police in one land worked with the police of all others. To-day that is true about criminals. After a war evil passions are loosed, and, since Russia is broken, in her they can make their headquarters...”
― John Buchan, Huntingtower

“The best way to be rid of quaking knees is to keep a busy mind.”
― John Buchan, Huntingtower