Here Be Dragons Quotes

“She did, now, want to escape. She had a lot to do; to get on with... there was so much, enjoyably much, to be done.”
― Stella Gibbons, Here Be Dragons

“Human beings: except inasmuch as they provided material for writers, what a bloody nuisance they were.”
― Stella Gibbons, Here Be Dragons

“I don't think I shall marry if I'm asked. There's too much occupational risk.”
― Stella Gibbons, Here Be Dragons

“How he enjoyed this preliminary interlocking of words and actions, this cautious and cunning scattering of the first grains of the powder-trail that should lead to some desired explosion, great or small... This moving about of human beings and influencing, if only in small ways, the pattern of their lives, was what he liked doing best next to wandering, in a dream, yet observing and hearing all that was going on about him... he saw the people whose lives he was thus gently fingering not as living beings but as characters, even as he was a character, in a story: and they were linked and mingled , too, in a kind of strongly pleasurable confusion, with the manuscript, growing ever more stained and inter-and-over corrected and crossed, which he carried in the portfolio that hardly ever left its place against his side.”
― Stella Gibbons, Here Be Dragons

“The joy which sometimes came to him while he was dreaming over the roofs and clouds visible from his window, or when the first line of a poem sprang up within him like a fountain, these, no doubt, were part of the 'psycho's' temperament; the reverse of the neurotic gloom.

Yet he did not truly, within himself, believe that they were; and while he was almost ready to accept, with poets of the past both minor and great, his share of the age-old misunderstanding of the poet's nature, something within him rebelled at being classified away into a psychoanalyst's case-book.

When the accusation had been made: when the verdict of 'morbid humours', or 'the vapours and the spleen', of 'unmanly weakness', or 'neurosis', had been passed, did not something remain, and escape? The contact of the flesh of his fingers with the petals of a quilted dahlia - was not that left behind, with all that it implied, after the poet had been classified and filed?”
― Stella Gibbons, Here Be Dragons

“Surely psychoanalysis was the greatest kill-joy of the delicious pangs of love since the Church had ceased to thunder.”
― Stella Gibbons, Here Be Dragons