A Very Private Gentleman Quotes

“I enjoy books. No room is fit for occupation without a lining of books.”
― Martin Booth, A Very Private Gentleman

“Catholicism - all the perversions of Christianity - is not a faith of love. It is a faith of fear. Obey, be good, toe the line, and heaven is yours, the first prize in the lottery of eternity. Disobey, react, cut the lifeline, and never-ceasing damnation is the booby prize. The dogma is, love the only god and you shall be safe. Fail in that love and he will not rescue you, not until you crawl and apologize and fawn before the altar. What kind of a religion demands such indignity?”
― Martin Booth, A Very Private Gentleman

“I enjoy books. No room is fit for occupation without a lining of books. They contain the condensed experiences of humanity. To live fully, one has to read widely.”
― Martin Booth, A Very Private Gentleman

“Real history is the commonplace, unrecorded.”
― Martin Booth, A Very Private Gentleman

“I do not understand how men can kill such beauty. There can be no joy, surely, in capturing such a masterpiece of evolution, gassing it with chloroform or squeezing its thorax until it is dead, setting it on a cork board until rigor mortis is advanced then pinning it, frozen by death, in a glass-topped case, hung over with a curtain to keep the light from fading the colours. To me, this is the height of frivolous insanity.Nothing can be gained from killing a butterfly. Killing a man is a different matter.”
― Martin Booth, A Very Private Gentleman

“So. I am here, alone, in the half-darkness of the Italian night, drinking rosy wine and dining on rose blossom. The world is good. Time has stopped. The moon is hidden by the distant storm. The streets are quiet for it is just before one o’clock, even the addicts gone, curled into their puzzle of fallacious dreams, the ground too wet in the Parco della Resistenza dell’ 8 Settembre for the lovers. The stars no longer move.”
― Martin Booth, A Very Private Gentleman

“that the human race would become extinct if every member of it could see themselves having sex?”
― Martin Booth, A Very Private Gentleman

“Rich girls are a pain in the arse in the sack:”
― Martin Booth, A Very Private Gentleman

“Whoever it was that first realized that a woman wronged is a dangerous animal, and I suspect he was a Neolithic half-ape, was immeasurably correct.”
― Martin Booth, A Very Private Gentleman

“we are, everyone of us, in arrears to death.”
― Martin Booth, A Very Private Gentleman

“Taboo is not a word considered with any seriousness in the Old World.”
― Martin Booth, A Very Private Gentleman

“A noisy bed-frame is the last sound many a man has heard. I do not intend to join the august company of deceased fools.”
― Martin Booth, A Very Private Gentleman

“The criminality added a certain spice to an otherwise stultifying existence in an utterly boring location.”
― Martin Booth, A Very Private Gentleman

“The sinner searches forever after a sign to prove it is worth his while to recant. I should know: I have been a sinner, and a catholic too”
― Martin Booth, A Very Private Gentleman