The Death of Grass Quotes

“A long time ago. I came to the understanding that all men are friends by convenience and enemies by choice.”
― John Christopher, The Death of Grass

“Living with guns, as I have done, one loses the habit of looking for gentleness in men.”
― John Christopher, The Death of Grass

“The moors themselves were barer, of course. The heather still grew, but the moorland grasses were gone; the outcrops of rocks jutted like teeth in the head of a skull.”
― John Christopher, The Death of Grass

“Pity always was a luxury. It’s all right if the tragedy’s a comfortable distance away – if you can watch it from a seat in the cinema. It’s different when you find it on your doorstep – on every doorstep.”
― John Christopher, The Death of Grass

“Funny creatures, women. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they do the sensible thing without hesitation. The hundredth time they do the other with the same enthusiasm.”
― John Christopher, The Death of Grass

“Before all this is over... are we going to hate ourselves? Or are we just going to get used to things, so that we don’t realise what we’re turning into?”
― John Christopher, The Death of Grass

“Even though brutality used toward the young, by reason of their defenselessness, provoked greater anger and greater pity, it was still true that they were resilient. Was the wind tempered to the shorn lamb? He grimaced. All the lambs were shorn now, and the wind was from the northeast, full of ice and black frost.”
― John Christopher, The Death of Grass

“Living with guns, as I have done, one loses the habit of looking for
gentleness in men.”
― John Christopher, The Death of Grass

“And thinking that, he felt a great weariness of spirit, as though out of the past his old self, his civilised self, challenged him to an accounting. When it sank below a certain level, was life itself worth the having any longer? They had lived in a world of morality whose lineage could be traced back nearly four thousand years. In a day, it had been swept from under them.”
― John Christopher, The Death of Grass

“Damn it!' John said. 'This isn't China.'
'No,' Roger said. 'This is a country of fifty million people that imports nearly half its food requirements.'
'We might have to tighten our belts.'
'A tight belt,' said Roger, 'looks silly on a skeleton.”
― John Christopher, The Death of Grass

“It was the Chinese government’s unwillingness to admit they were faced with a problem they couldn’t master that’s got them in the worst of this mess.”
― John Christopher, The Death of Grass

“At my guess, the Emergency Committee’s a triumvirate, and composed of a professional anarchist, a parson, and a left-wing female schoolteacher. It would take that kind of combination to show such an ignorance of elementary human behaviour.”
― John Christopher, The Death of Grass

“I know I speak from the exalted wisdom of an ex-Public Relations Officer, but you don’t have to have had much to do with humanity in the mass to know that honesty is never advisable and frequently disastrous.”
― John Christopher, The Death of Grass

“[Y]ou fail to take my point. I had not meant that the English are inhibited from violence. Under the right circumstances, they will murder with a will, and more cheerfully than most. But they are sluggish in logic as well as imagination. They will preserve illusions to the very end. It is only after that that they will fight like particularly savage tigers.”
― John Christopher, The Death of Grass

“«La pietà è sempre stata un lusso. Tutto va bene quando il dramma è a una distanza considerevole, quando lo si guarda stando seduti nelle poltrone di un cinema. È molto diverso quando te lo trovi sulla soglia di casa...»”
― John Christopher, La morte dell'erba