The Nebuly Coat Quotes

“It is sad when man’s unhappiness veils from him the smiling face of nature. The promise of the early morning was maintained. The sky was of a translucent blue, broken with islands and continents of clouds, dazzling white like cotton-wool. A soft, warm breeze blew from the west, the birds sang merrily in every garden bush, and Cullerne was a town of gardens, where men could sit each under his own vine and fig-tree. The bees issued forth from their hives, and hummed with cheery droning chorus in the ivy-berries that covered the wall-tops with deep purple. The old vanes on the corner pinnacles of Saint Sepulchre’s tower shone as if they had been regilt. Great flocks of plovers flew wheeling over Cullerne marsh, and flashed with a blinking silver gleam as they changed their course suddenly. Even through the open window of the organist’s room fell a shaft of golden sunlight that lit up the peonies of the faded, threadbare carpet.

But inside beat two poor human hearts, one unhappy and one hopeless, and saw nothing of the gold vanes, or the purple ivy-berries, or the plovers, or the sunlight, and heard nothing of the birds or the bees.”
― John Meade Falkner, The Nebuly Coat

“We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain that we shall carry nothing out. When that comes into my mind, I think rather of the little things rather than of gold or lands. Intimate letters that a man treasured more than money; little tokens of which the clue has died with him; the unfinished work to which he was coming back, and never came; even the unpaid bills that worried him; for death transfigures all, and makes the commonplace pathetic.”
― John Meade Falkner, The Nebuly Coat

“For Nature, if she once endows man or woman with romance, gives them so rich a store of it as shall last them, life through, unto the end. In sickness or health, in poverty or riches, through middle age and old age, through loss of hair and loss of teeth, under wrinkled face and gouty limbs, under crow’s-feet and double chins, under all the least romantic and most sordid malaisances of life, romance endures to the end. Its price is altogether above rubies; it can never be taken away from those that have it, and those that have it not, can never acquire it for money, nor by the most utter toil—no, nor ever arrive at the very faintest comprehension of it.”
― John Meade Falkner, The Nebuly Coat

“A little later Anastasia was sitting before her bedroom fire writing. It has a magic of its own—the bedroom fire. Not such a one as night by night warms hothouse bedrooms of the rich, but that which burns but once or twice a year. How the coals glow between the bars, how the red light shimmers on the black-lead bricks, how the posset steams upon the hob! Milk or tea, cocoa or coffee, poor commonplace liquids, are they not transmuted in the alembic of a bedroom fire, till they become nepenthe for a heartache or a philtre for romance? Ah, the romance of it, when youth forestalls to-morrow’s conquest, when middle life forgets that yesterday is past for ever, when even querulous old age thinks it may still have its “honour and its toil”!”
― John Meade Falkner, The Nebuly Coat

“He was in that broken mood for which the Middle Ages offered the cloister as a remedy; he felt the urgent need of sacrifice and abnegation to purge him.”
― John Meade Falkner, The Nebuly Coat

“Is there any depression so deep as this? is there any night so dark as this first eclipse of the soul, this first conscious stilling of the instinct for right?”
― John Meade Falkner, The Nebuly Coat

“She went back to the kitchen, for the kitchen of the Hand of God was so large that Miss Joliffe and Anastasia used part of it for their sitting-room, took the pencil out of “Northanger Abbey,” and tried to transport herself to Bath. Five minutes ago she had been in the Grand Pump Room herself, and knew exactly where Mrs Allen and Isabella Thorpe and Edward Morland were sitting; where Catherine was standing, and what John Thorpe was saying to her when Tilney walked up. But alas! Anastasia found no re-admission; the lights were put out, the Pump Room was in darkness. A sad change to have happened in five minutes; but no doubt the charmed circle had dispersed in a huff on finding that they no longer occupied the first place in Miss Anastasia Joliffe’s interest. And, indeed, she missed them the less because she had discovered that she herself possessed a wonderful talent for romance, and had already begun the first chapter of a thrilling story.”
― John Meade Falkner, The Nebuly Coat

“...Will you not join me in a cup of cocoa? The kettle boils.”

Mr Sharnall’s face fell.

“You ought to have been an old woman,” he said; “only old women drink cocoa. Well, I don’t mind if I do; any port in a storm.”
― John Meade Falkner, The Nebuly Coat

“Westray remembered the organist’s manner in the church, and began to suspect that his mind was turned. The other read his thoughts, and said rather reproachfully:

“Oh no, I am not mad—only weak and foolish and very cowardly.”
― John Meade Falkner, The Nebuly Coat

“Poverty’s a chilly theme,” he said; “let’s take something to warm us before we go on with the variations.”
― John Meade Falkner, The Nebuly Coat