65 Short Stories Quotes

“Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that this is neither innocent nor praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I. Conversation after a time bores me, games tire me, and my own thoughts, which we are told are the unfailing resource of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to my book as the opium–smoker to his pipe. I”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“Mrs Davidson was saying she didn’t know how they’d have got through the journey if it hadn’t been for us,’ said Mrs Macphail as she neatly brushed out her transformation. ‘She said we were really the only people on the ship they cared to know.’ ‘I shouldn’t have thought a missionary was such a big bug that he could afford to put on frills.’
‘It’s not frills. I quite understand what she means. It wouldn’t have been very nice for the Davidsons to have to mix with all that rough lot in the smoking– room.’
‘The founder of their religion wasn’t so exclusive,’ said Dr Macphail with a chuckle.
‘I’ve asked you over and over again not to joke about religion,’ answered his wife. ‘I shouldn’t like to have a nature like yours, Alec. You never look for the best in people.’
He gave her a sidelong glance with his pale, blue eyes, but did not reply. After many years of married life he had learned that it was more conducive to peace to leave his wife with the last word. He was undressed before she was, and climbing into the upper bunk he settled down to read himself to sleep.
When he came on deck next morning they were close to land. He looked at it with greedy eyes. There was a thin strip of silver beach rising quickly to hills covered to the top with luxuriant vegetation. The coconut trees, thick and green, came nearly to the water’s edge, and among them you saw the grass houses of the Samoans; and here and there, gleaming white, a little church. Mrs Davidson came and stood beside him. She was dressed in black and wore round her neck a gold chain, from which dangled a small cross. She was a little woman, with brown, dull hair very elaborately arranged, and she had prominent blue eyes behind invisible pince–nez. Her face was long, like a sheep’s, but she gave no impression of foolishness, rather of extreme alertness; she had the quick movements of a bird. The most remarkable thing about her was her voice, high, metallic, and without inflexion; it”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“He was like a brick made to take its place with a million others in a huge factory, but by chance with a flaw in it so that it is inadequate to its purpose. And the brick too, if it had a mind, might cry: What have I done that I cannot fulfil my modest end, but must be taken away from all these other bricks that support me and thrown on the dust-heap? It was no fault of Henry Chester’s that he was incapable of the conceptions that might have enabled him to bear his calamity with resignation. It is not everyone who can find solace in art or thought. It is the tragedy of our day that these humble souls have lost their faith in God, in whom lay hope, and their belief in a resurrection that might bring them the happiness that has been denied them on earth; and have found nothing to put in their place.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“His principle all through life had been, when you’ve made a bad bet, pay up and forget about it. He’d had a good run for his money and he was ready to call it a day. It had been a damned good party while it lasted, but every party’s got to come to an end, and next day it doesn’t matter much if you went home with the milk or if you left while the fun was in full swing.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“He was not a business man; he was a scientist, and science is milk-brother to art.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“Most of us fall in and out of love; some men can only love once.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“The fact is, and I have noticed it so often that I do not know why it should always surprise me, that the extraordinariness of a man’s life does not make him extraordinary, but contrariwise if a man is extraordinary he will make extraordinariness out of a life as humdrum as that of a country curate.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“The will needs obstacles in order to exercise its power; when it is never thwarted, when no effort is needed to achieve ones desires, because one has placed one’s desires only in the things that can be obtained by stretching out one’s hand, the will grows impotent. If you walk on a level all the time the muscles you need to climb a mountain will atrophy. These observations are trite, but there they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“Leisure,’ he said. ‘If people only knew! It’s the most priceless thing a man can have and they’re such fools they don’t even know it’s something to aim at. Work? They work for work’s sake. They haven’t got the brains to realize that the only object of work is to obtain leisure.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“Honour be damned. One has one’s happiness to think of. Is one’s honour really concerned because one’s wife hops into bed with another man? We’re not crusaders, you and I, or Spanish grandees. I liked my wife. I don’t say I haven’t had other women. I have. But she had just that something that none of the others could give me. What a fool I was to throw away what I wanted more than anything in the world because I couldn’t enjoy exclusive possession of it!”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“What are you going to do with yourself?’
‘Oh, don’t bother about me. I shall slack around. I’ll stroll down and look at the town.’
‘There’s not much to see.’
‘All the better. I’m fed up with sights.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“People are always a little disconcerted when you do not recognize them, they are so important to themselves, it is a shock to discover of what small importance they are to others.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“Why novels and plays are so often untrue to life is because their authors, perhaps of necessity, make their characters all of a piece. They cannot afford to make them self-contradictory, for then they become incomprehensible, and yet self-contradictory is what most of us are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“For three days Ashenden led the idle life that fitted so well the fantastical, untidy, and genial city. He did nothing from morning till night but wander at random, looking, not with the eye of the tourist who seeks for what ought to be seen, nor with the eye of the writer who looks for his own (seeing in a sunset a melodious phrase or in a face the inkling of a character), but with that of the tramp to whom whatever happens is absolute.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“Just as passion will make use brazenly of the hackneyed phrase, so will chance show itself insensitive to the triteness of the literary convention.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“Let’s face it, Margery’s a middle-aged woman, Charlie was fifty-five and they’d been married for sixteen years. It was natural enough that she should lose her head over a young man who made a fuss of her. But don’t call it love. It was physiology.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“Of course I thought her very foolish, but if the folly of men made one angry one would pass one’s life in a state of chronic ire.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“It is always difficult for a man to stomach the want of reticence that women betray in their private affairs. They have no shame. They will talk to one another without embarrassment of the most intimate matters. Modesty is a masculine virtue. But though a man may know this theoretically, each time he is confronted with women’s lack of reserve he suffers a new shock.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“It was not hard to believe that in youth he had been as beautiful as people said. He had still his fine Semitic profile and the lustrous black eyes that had caused havoc in so many a Gentile breast.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“...he could do anything he liked with a woman. The ContrOleur could not imagine what it was they saw in him. He was casual with them and rather brutal. He took what they gave him, but seemed incapable of gratitude. He used them for his pleasure and then flung them indifferently away. Once or twice this had got him into trouble, and Mr Gruyter had had to sentence an angry father for sticking a knife in Ginger Ted’s back one night, and a Chinese woman had sought to poison herself by swallowing opium because he had deserted her. Once Mr Jones came to the ContrOleur in a great state because the beachcomber had seduced one of his converts. The ContrOleur agreed that it was very deplorable, but could only advise Mr Jones to keep a sharp eye on these young persons.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“The ContrOleur could not but think that it was rather a clumsy device to bring those two together that necessitated the death of six hundred innocent persons, but not being well versed in the ways of omnipotence he made no remark.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“One of the many inconveniences of real life is that it seldom gives you a complete story. Some incident has excited your interest, the people who are concerned in it are in the devil’s own muddle, and you wonder what on earth will happen next. Well, generally nothing happens. The inevitable catastrophe you foresaw wasn’t inevitable after all, and high tragedy, without any regard to artistic decency, dwindles into drawing-room comedy. Now, growing old has many disadvantages, but it has this compensation (among, let us admit, not a few others), that sometimes it gives you the opportunity of seeing what was the outcome of certain events you had witnessed long ago. You had given up the hope of ever knowing what was the end of the story, and then, when you least expected it, it is handed to you on a platter.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“I was about to speak; I held my tongue; though I shrugged a spiritual shoulder I was touched. Peter had seen in her what he was determined to see. There was something very like beauty in his illusion. In his own way he was a poet.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“I don’t want to play the heavy father, but there are three things especially that I want to warn you against: one is gambling, don’t gamble; the second is money, don’t lend anyone money; and the third is women, don’t have anything to do with women. If you don’t do any of those three things you can’t come to much harm, so remember them well.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“it has this compensation (among, let us admit, not a few others), that sometimes it gives you the opportunity of seeing what was the outcome of certain events you had witnessed long ago. You had given up the hope of ever knowing what was the end of the story, and then, when you least expected it, it is handed to you on a platter. These”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“He took you by force–yes, he was drunk at the time. It’s not the first time that’s happened to a woman and it won’t be the last time.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“You must let bygones be bygones.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories

“wasn’t my fault, it was the circumstances. Can’t you forgive me?”
― W. Somerset Maugham, 65 Short Stories