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unearths some literary gems.
***“Do yer knaw him?”“Know him! T-t-t—” Mr. Ashworth went on making this t-t-t noise for about two minutes.***“The Silver King”…. was the name they had given Mr. Mitcham’s overcoat, which was no ordinary garment. It had first made its appearance at Haxby…, and immediately it had seemed as if another person had joined the party. Mr. Mitcham was now described as “travelling an overcoat,” just as some players are said to “travel” a mother or other relative…. It had the air of having been round the world far more times than Mr. Mitcham himself, and of having seen places that its owner would never be permitted to see. At any moment…, you felt that this astounding overcoat might begin to supplement Mr. Mitcham’s travel reminiscences or set him right in a loud voice.***“Not at all! Rather! Absolutely! roared Inigo, who did not know what he was saying.[Cf. Can of Yams: "Gesundheit. You’re welcome. Mazel tov. Please, I insist."]***“That,” said Inigo with deliberation, “was our fellow passenger, a large and rather tight gentleman with a mind like a cheap Christmas card.”***“He said something about having the scenery and props and script of a revue (I think its name was ‘And You’re Another!’)....”***And his eyebrows completed the rebuke.***Unkerlarthur came nearer and was so confidential that his mouth seemed to slip round to the right side of his face and stay there.***“Well, I don’t know,” he remarked, feeling the end of his nose as if he were not sure it was still there.***“You show ’em tha’, you’ll walk up withou’ a wor’.” Thus Mr. Milbrau, who ended by gabbling so furiously there was hardly a consonant left in his speech.
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unearths some literary gems.
From E. V. Lucas:
***
"Wiles says that apes are the next things to us. Wiles says they have brains and beautiful natures; but what gives me most peace of mind is knowing that they haven't got tails. Tails would be too much, as I often tell him. I've got a bit of writing about it which Wiles found in a dictionary, and if you'll permit me, sir, I'll bring it round and show it to you to-morrow morning. I always keep it in the Bible, handy."
Mrs. Wiles unfolded it the next morning and I read aloud these words: "In common use the word ape extends to all the tribe of monkeys and baboons, but in the zoological sense" ("Ah!" said Mrs. Wiles, smoothing her apron) "It is restricted to those higher organized species of the Linnaean genus Simia, which are destitute of a tail, as the ourangs, chimpanzees, and gibbons."
"There!" she said triumphantly, when I had finished.
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unearths some literary gems.
***
“Than bring a bottle of the Old and Crusted,” and Mr. Mitcham gives such richness to his vowel sounds that already the wine seems twice as old and crusted as it was before…. After almost chasing the waiter out of the room with his eyebrows, Mr. Mitcham sits down with the air of a man who not only knows a good wine but also knows how to order a good wine.
***
Even such people as printers and costumers had to be “wired” too; and all these wires promptly produced other wires, some of them so compressed that they might as well have been in cipher, and others of a staggering length and fluency, like strange heads coming round the door and screaming at the top of their voices at her.
***
["It's Risqué Only in Retrospect" dept.]
Miss Thong has a part in the homely epic; it is a very tiny part—no more than that of a whispering ghost—but we cannot say it has no significance.
[Later]
“I thought I was going to be lost and then they’d have to put a notice up: ‘Lost—Miss Thong. Finder Rewarded.’”
***
But she did not stay for the performance in the evening…. She insisted upon returning, as she had planned, by the 5:35, and said so a good many times, for somehow it sounded like a train that a strong-minded woman would catch.
***
Becoming more mysteriously West Riding in his turn of phrase with every added insult, [he] would conclude by muttering that Mr. Jerningham “wer war ner a pike sheep heead,” which final and awful judgment was not the less devastating because nobody understood what it meant.
***
In Bruddersford you are always on the lookout for swelled heads, and if a man does anything at all out of the ordinary there, his head has to be measured at once.
***
“Let the word go round, and song and cheer be all our what’s its name.”
[Later]
“Let joy and what’s-its-name be unconfined.”
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unearths some literary gems.
***
“You heard those tunes of mine?” said Inigo, wheeling round excitedly. “I have a phrase describing ’em, thought of it the other day. They’re like a family of elves in dress suits. How’s that?”
“Not bad,” said Fauntley, “but I’d rather have the tunes.”
***
“I commend your soul to the Eternal Verities, Felton, though I haven’t the least notion what they are.”
***
“I’ve seen some changes i’ my time. You take textile trade nar—”
But Mr. Poppleby wasn’t taking it. “That is so.”
***
Miss Trant was now positive that the little man, the very uneasy little man, was Mr. Eric Tipstead. To begin with, he looked exactly like a Mr. Eric Tipstead.
***
Miss Trant said nothing because there did not seem to be anything suitable to say. One of those vague little sympathetic noises would have done, but you cannot make them in a car, at least you cannot possibly make them loud enough to be heard.
***
“Just fancy!”…. Gaiety itself, Effie invited them all to fancy with her.
***
“South Dakota!” Inigo’s cry was ecstatic. The man must really have been there because you couldn’t think of South Dakota, couldn’t just lift it out of some mental map.
***
Inigo never knew what to reply to remarks of this kind about the weather. People who made them always seemed to belong to a society of weather observers or even weather owners, and he always felt that he himself was too much of an outsider to do more than merely mumble something in response.
***
“She was easily the world’s worst as a pianist. She daren’t have looked Little Nelly’s Instruction Book in the face.”
***
“She insisted upon telling me all about the annual dinner of the Rawsley and West Something-or-other Horticultural Society, which has been held here since 1898. So there!”
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unearths some literary gems.
***
She had begun to wonder whether Wandlebury had walked away in the night, leaving the countryside unblotted by its tenancy.
***
“Most aggravating!” said Mr. Tyler, bustling in like a fussy little steamboat.
***
She had always wondered how you painted the town red—it sounded a fine thing to do.
***
In a new friend we start life anew, for we create a new edition of ourselves and so become, for the time being, a new creature.
***
“I suppose you are alluding to cubism.”
Mr. Abbott said he was—he really had very little idea as to what he had been alluding to, but this answer seemed fairly safe. Mr. Marvell evidently expected a reply in the affirmative and Mr. Abbott felt he deserved it—the claret was excellent.
***
“[Writing] isn’t like building—not a bit. In building, you see, you know beforehand what it’s going to be like; at least, I suppose you do. I mean, it would never do to start off building a house and find you’ve built a bridge, or something, when it was all finished.”
***
[Precursing JC-E dept.]
Everybody in Wandlebury was aware of the young Marvells' passion for collecting buttons[....]There were big buttons and small buttons, buttons with "necks," and buttons with holes; there were colored buttons—of every hue—there were white buttons, and black buttons, and buttons of mother-of-pearl.
[cf.]
FRANCES: Buttons, girlfriend, buttons! Buttons on Grand-muh-mah’s skirts, on her blouses and sweaters, on the television and the microwave console. Wooden buttons, steel buttons, plastic and ceramic buttons...Glass! Brass! Fourteen-karat gold! And genuine cousin of pearl!
PEARL: You see, what with one thing and another, I’d forgotten that among Cousin Frances’s eccentricities was this pronounced enthusiasm for buttons.
***
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unearths some literary gems.
From "The English Filter," by C. E. Bechhofer Roberts:
***
[Sometimes figuring out the origin of a nickname is as easy as ABC.]
I am unlikely ever to forget the visit that my friend A. B. C. Hawkes, the scientist, and I paid to Rome. "A. B. C.," as I always call him, had let only one man know we were coming.
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unearths some literary gems.
***
It was funny, I suppose, but at the time, my sense of humor was vacationing on another island.
***
[Bonus: This is book 4 in a series. At one point in book 3, a character (nonrecurring, afaik) who's a ballet dancer who moonlights doing TV commercials tells the narrator-protagonist about having danced opposite a tube of toothpaste all day. Now, in book 4, the narrator-protag (who, as we've known since book 1, had a past career as a tap-dancer), refers to herself as having been a tap-dancing tube of toothpaste on a TV commercial. In other words, the author--perhaps having decided in retrospect that the tapping toothpaste was too good to have thrown away on a one-time character--has reassigned this resume item for her star!]
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unearths some literary gems.
[This delightful excerpt is the very beginning of this novel and, what's more, its whimsical spirit is rather uncharacteristic of the author, who runs more to dry and unfanciful wit. So it was an unexpected treat for me upon opening the book (after which the author returned to her normal behavior).]
***
I looked out of the window and exclaimed, "Par exemple!"
It is not that I am in the habit of bursting into French. My knowledge of the language got stuck at school level. But years ago I saw that outstanding film, Carnet de Bal, and in it a mayor, who is just about to marry his cook, looks out of the window and sees a very glamorous love of his youth crossing the street towards his house and he cries out, "Par exemple!" It had seemed to me an adequate thing to say in the circumstances. So it was what I said when I saw my erstwhile husband, Felix Freer, wandering up the garden path towards the front door of the house where I was staying.
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unearths some literary gems.
From The Good Companions, by J. B. Priestley:
***
“That’s what I should do in your place. Never hesitate a moment. Go slap into business.” Mrs. Chillingford said this with immense gusto, then went slap into a piece of sandwich cake.
***
“Cynthia Grumm, you know, who lives in Paris and has abolished the sentence altogether and makes new words all the time, has promised to write for us.”
***
“You know how things do get about.” She herself did not know at all how such things got about, but it sounded convincing.
“Rather,” said Hilary, who knew even less. They looked at one another knowingly, and enjoyed themselves.
***
Mr. Rathbury’s moustache made some vague sound that implied it was in entire agreement with her.
***
“What you want now is a change,” he concluded, with the air of a man who knew what a change was, even though he had never had one.
***
The tune was his, and he began toying ecstatically with it. Now it ran whispering in the high treble; now it crooned and gurgled in the bass; and then, off it went scampering, with a flash of red heels and a tossing of brown curls. There was no holding it at all. It pirouetted round the room, mocking the desks and blackboards and maps: the air was full of its bright mischief.
***
And she swept round as if she were on a swivel, drew herself up, and marched out.
***
Such was Fauntley. It was impossible to dislike him, but it was not difficult to feel that somehow one would be better off in some place where he was not.
***
“But look here,” Felton began, signalling an alarm with his eye-glasses.
“No time to look there, Felton,” said Inigo sternly.
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unearths some literary gems.
***
Sheep and pigs...and cows...bleated, grunted and lowed, according to their persuasion.
***
He was in the early fifties, clean-shaven, with thick greying hair brushed back from his forehead, large well-kept hands—but it will be as well if we return to our interrupted narrative.
***
"That's the trouble with you," said Charlton severely. "You haven't mastered the art of digression."
***
"We do know that all the persons who supplied the names in your copper-plate records are as innocent as a new-born babe or any other revolting simile that may occur to us."
***
Martin murmured something about angles that would have pained Euclid.
***
"Have you ever caught yourself taking an intense interest in anything written upside down?"
***
To the best of her belief, the lettering on the side of it said:
"Something about somebody's biscuits."
***
Mr. Muttigen smiled deprecatingly.
"The 'g' is hard, as in 'tiger,'" he said, as if the phonetic anomaly was entirely his fault.
***
She suggested rather testily that he came [sic] inside, instead of standing there like, to use her own phrase, that.
***
"I shall tell 'im just what I think, Mrs. Simmonds, and if you don't like it, you can do the other thing." [I guess the unmentionable "other thing" would be lumping it?]
***
"Thank you, Miss Higgins," smiled Charlton.
"Iggens is the name," repeated the cook with an impatient flounce, "and Iggens is what I said. There's no haitch."
***
"I'd 'ave given in me notice and packed me trunk before you could say--"
"But surely," threw in Charlton, who was sick of the gentleman she was about to mention.
"Jack Robinson," said Miss Iggens triumphantly.
[Unlike Charlton, I don't find I encounter Mr. Robinson all that often; but it happened that Jack R. also popped up around the same time in The Good Companions, which I was reading concurrently--and with some hat eating, for good measure.
"If we're not up, right at top o't'tree, a'most afore you can say Jack Robi'son, nay, I'll eat this cap."]
***
"There are twenty-three Geoffrey Somebodies."
***
[Falling in Love with Your Own Characters department, Editorial "We" division]
As John Rutherford was to say, she had dark shingled hair, an incontrovertibly tip-tilted nose, big brown eyes and a voice like the sweet sound that breathes upon a bank of violets. He was madly in love with the girl, of course, but then, if it comes to that, so are we.
***
"There are now anxiously waiting for me a large assortment of ailing ladies, who have been at death's door for so many years that I really don't think there's anyone at home!"
***
[Blank Maps to Nonexistent Risqué Poetry dept. The protagonists are looking over what is presumably a specimen of "dirty" verse, which is not shared with the reader.]
"That line doesn't scan," he said. "Listen to this."
He read the first few stanzas aloud, beating the rhythm with his hand.
"There, that's wrong, isn't it? If they'd put 'mournfully' instead of 'sadly' it would have made all the difference."
"Or 'disconsolately,'" suggested Charlton, falling in with the spirit of the thing.
"That's it!" said the Super enthusiastically. "'Disconsolately dumti-dumti-dum.'"
***
"You say that it didn't matter to the Sniper whether 'e shot Ransome or the Four 'Orsemen of the Apoca-how-much."
***
"I laugh only at my own jokes before lunch," said Weston severely.
***
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