The Daughter of Time Quotes

“It's an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don't want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it. If they were merely indifferent it would be natural and understandable. But it is much stronger than that, much more positive. They are annoyed.

Very odd, isn't it.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“Most people's first books are their best anyways. It's the one they wanted most to write.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“The truth of anything at all doesn't lie in someone's account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper, the sale of a house, the price of a ring.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“Grant had dealt too long with the human intelligence to accept as truth someone's report of someone's report of what that someone remembered to have seen or been told.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“That is why historians surprise me. They seem to have no talent for the likeliness of any situation. They see history like a peepshow; with two-dimensional figures against a distant background.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn't, of course. It's a small niggling thing.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“Alan Grant: "There are... far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It's a horrible thought."

The Midget (his nurse): "You sound constipated.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“It’s an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don’t want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“Next Christmas he was going to open this shabby sack of hers... and put something in the money compartment. She would fritter it away, of course, in small unimportances; so that in the end she would not know what she had done with it; but perhaps a series of small satisfactions scattered like sequins over the texture of everyday life was of greater worth than the academic satisfaction of owning a collection of fine objects at the back of a drawer.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“The Sweat and the Furrow was Silas Weekley being earthly and spade-conscious all over seven hundred pages. The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas's last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the the hayloft, everyone else lying low in the barn. The rain dripped from the thatch, and the manure steamed in the midden. Silas never omitted the manure. It was not Silas's fault that its steam provided the only uprising element in the picture. If Silas could have discovered a brand of steam that steamed downwards, Silas would have introduced it.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“He knew by heart every last minute crack on its surface. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them; rivers, islands, and continents. He had made guessing games of it and discovered hidden objects; faces, birds, and fishes. He made mathematical calculations of it and rediscovered his childhood; theorems, angles, and triangles. There was practically nothing else he could do but look at it. He hated the sight of it.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“It was shocking how little history remained with one after a good education.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“If Richard had not made friends he had certainly influenced people.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“The sorrows of humanity are no one’s sorrows, as newspaper readers long ago found out. A frisson of horror may go down one’s spine at wholesale destruction but one’s heart stays unmoved. A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“Every schoolboy turned over the final page of Richard III with relief, because now at last the Wars of the Roses were over and they could get on to the Tudors, who were dull but easy to follow.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“They’re rather sweet together. In some ways they are more like twins than lovers. They have that utter trust in each other; that dependence on the other half to make a proper whole.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“Grant paused in the act of turning the thing over, to consider the face a moment longer. A judge? A soldier? A prince? Someone used to great responsibility, and responsible in his authority. Someone too-conscientious. A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist. A man at ease in a large design, but anxious over details. A candidate for gastric ulcer. Someone, too, who had suffered ill-health as a child. He had that incommunicable, that indescribable look that childhood suffering leaves behind it; less positive than the look on a cripple’s face, but as inescapable. This the artist had both understood and translated into terms of paint. The slight fullness of the lower eyelid, like a child that has slept too heavily; the texture of the skin; the old-man look in a young face.
He turned the portrait over to look for a caption.
On the back was printed: Richard the Third. From the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. Artist Unknown.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“It’s an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don’t want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it. If they were merely indifferent it would be natural and understandable. But it is much stronger than that, much more positive. They are annoyed.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“The point is that every single man who was there knows that the story is nonsense, and yet it has never been contradicted. It will never be overtaken now. It is a completely untrue story grown to legend while the men who knew it to be untrue looked on and said nothing.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“I’m a plain man, I am; no nonsense about me.’ And no manners, grace, or generosity, either.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“Cromwell started that inverted snobbery from which we are all suffering today. ‘I’m a plain man, I am; no nonsense about me.’ And no manners, grace, or generosity, either.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“There are far too many people born into the world, and far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It’s a horrible thought.” “You sound constipated,” said The Midget.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas’s last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the hayloft, everyone else lying low in the barn.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“What happened in 1603?” Grant asked, his mind still on Tyrrel. “We had the Scots tied to our tails for good.” “Better than having them at our throats every five minutes.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“Oh, come! You can’t expect to pick Great Discoveries off bushes. If you can’t be a pioneer what’s wrong with leading a crusade?’

‘A crusade?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Against what?’

‘Tonypandy.’

The boy’s face lost its blankness. It looked suddenly amused, like someone who has just seen a joke.

‘It’s the damnedest silliest name, isn’t it!’ he remarked.

‘If people have been pointing out for three hundred and fifty years that Richard didn’t murder his nephews and a schoolbook can still say, in words of one syllable and without qualification, that he did, then it seems to me that Tonypandy has a long lead on you. It’s time you got busy.’

‘But what can I do when people like Walpole and those have failed?’

‘There’s that old saying about constant water and its effect on stone.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“She would fritter it away, of course, in small unimportances; so that in the end she would not know what she had done with it; but perhaps a series of small satisfactions scattered like sequins over the texture of everyday life was of greater worth than the academic satisfaction of owning a collection of fine objects at the back of a drawer.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“that the best painters didn’t paint you till you were past your best.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“You think he belonged to the type who can’t live with themselves any more.’ ‘What a good description! Yes. The kind who want something badly, and then discover that the price they have paid for it is too high.’ ‘So you don’t think he was an out-and-out villain?’ ‘No; oh, no. Villains don’t suffer, and that face is full of the most dreadful pain.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time