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unearths some literary gems.
***
Everything about her was no-nonsense, including her attitude to her books, which were (she often said) utter nonsense.
***
[Discourse That's Measurable in Geographic Distances dept.]
He was getting, thought Melrose, the answer he deserved--one that would stretch from here to Victoria Street and back.
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Unfortunately, gentlemen from Porlock, like cops, were never around when you needed them.
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"No they didn't, old sweatshirt, to paraphrase Trueblood." [Marshall Trueblood habitually addresses his friends as "old sweat."]
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At the end of the room, the long-case clock bonged out the hour of six in sympathy.
***
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unearths some literary gems.
From The Tunnel of Love, by Peter De Vries:
***"Tell him your story about Helmholz," the hostess said, after the presentation, and was off in a gasp of taffeta.***I hung on her words, which her pretty mouth fashioned with a somewhat overprecise diction, like shapes turned out by a cookie-cutter.***I had her recite to me in pear-shaped tones. Later we went to town and bought tone-shaped pears.***Friends have noticed--or at least I have noticed--a resemblance between my diction and that of George Sanders.***"We'll go where we can hear the larks again.""Larks, my dear, should be had, not heard."***At one end was a drawing board on which was a captionless sketch of a goat in a vacant lot eating a copy of Duncan Hines's restaurant guide.***"Oh, the joke business!" I groaned. Augie chose that moment to drop all the papers he was holding to the floor with a smack, and didn't hear what I said, so I had to regroan it.***"Are you of two minds about them?""Yes and no."***"Now then," she said, settling into a pull-up chair. Now then indeed.***
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unearths some literary gems.
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unearths some literary gems.
From The Twelfth Hour, by Ada Leverson:
[I learned that Leverson was a friend of Oscar Wilde. Funny, you'd never know it from her writing style! (;v>]
"He was a good-looking, amiable, and wealthy young man, who was as lavish as if he had not had a penny."
"For under all her outward sentimentality, Felicity was full of tenderness."
"Isn't it fun, Savile, being the only stupid person in a crowd of clever people? They make such a fuss about one."
[All those bon mots are from the first chapter!]
More snippets...
***
"And who will be the great card this time, Savile?"
"Of course, Roy Beaumont, the inventor."
"What on earth's he invented?"
"Himself, I should think. He's only about twenty-one."
***
Sir James sat down slowly on a depressed leather uneasy chair.
***
Woodville found Mervyn neither studying a part, reading his notices, nor looking in the glass.
***
"By Jove!" said Woodville, looking at the photograph.
"Why do you say 'By Jove!'?" asked Mervyn suspiciously.
"Why? Well! I must say something! You always show me things on which no other comment is possible but an exclamation, or you tell me things so unanswerable that there's nothing to say at all."
***
"I want to talk about Lady Chetwode. I'm awfully in love with her."
"Didn't know you knew her."
"I don't. That's nothing to do with it. You can be awfully in love with a person you don't know. In fact, I believe I can be far more seriously devoted to a perfect stranger than to a woman I know personally."
***
"I'm certain I met you in a previous existence," continued the young man.
"What a good memory you must have, Mr. Wilton! It's as much as I can do to remember the people I meet in this existence."
***
...a certain widow, whom his friends said he spoke of as "Agatha, Mrs. Wilkinson," to give the effect of a non-existent title
***
"'Lady Virginia Creeper at home. Five to seven.' Well, I can't help it. Let her stop at home. It's the best place for her."
***
"Just fancy making such a horrible proposition! At Willis's, too!"
"Well, what's the matter with Willis's? Would it have been all right at the 'Cheshire Cheese'?"
"What's the 'Cheshire Cheese'?"
"Never mind," said Savile mysteriously. (He didn't know.)
***
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unearths some literary gems.
With a rather wooden face, high cheek-bones, a tall, thin figure, and no expression, Anne might have been any age; but she was not.
***
***
"a hat that looked like a piece of spinach on toast"
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unearths some literary gems.
From Bimbos of the Death Sun, by Sharyn McCrumb:
In a green turtleneck sweater and medallion, Richard Faber looked like a champagne bottle.
***
From All Other Things, by Charlotte Stein:
She tried to roll her eyes and missed.
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unearths some literary gems.
From Miss Hargreaves, by Frank Baker:
[This book boasts a postscript from the future! The body of the first-person narrator's chronicle is dated 1939-1940, and it recounts experiences that took place in 1939. Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker was indeed published in 1940; but it included a postscript by the narrator written later in life, which is dated "1965."]
***
No doubt about it. I was precariously poised on the Spur of the Moment.
***
"What are trousers compared to truth?"
***
"The way she looked me up and down through those what-d'you-call-'ems."
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"Remember you have to live up to a nine-foot hat and be brave."
***
Wadge, the other tenor, a pleasant fellow who has a habit of putting in aspirates in unlikely places (he has a favourite solo in which he sings "Thou crownest the h-year!") turned and patted me on the back. "A faithful female friend is very nice for a h-young man," he said.
***
"It has often occurred to me," she said a little breathlessly, "that since there exists a beetle who resembles a stag, there may possibly exist a stag who resembles a beetle."
***
"We're here to-day gone to-morrow and some say to-morrow never comes, so perhaps we don't go."
***
"Janus lost the three-thirty," he said. "Backed him both ways, my boy. Had to with a name like that. What did Janus have--two ears or two elbows, something."
***
"A ghost couldn't play a harp as well as she does," he said.
***
Uncle Grosvenor! I'll Uncle Grosvenor you!"
***
"You and I couldn't write like that, not even if we kept ten white owls in our bathrooms."
***
We saw an avaricious-looking brass fowl with one eye cocked sideways as though it feared somebody were going to bag the Bible—or perhaps as though it hoped somebody were going to.
***
I read it a dozen more times, held it up to the light, shook it, smelt it, and finally spilt some tea over it.
***
"Parrots are intelligent birds," said father. "Knew one once that could recite a Shakespeare sonnet. All except the last line."
"Oh well," said mother, "I certainly don't want a harp and a parrot in the house."
***
Nothing ever surprises father. He can’t even surprise himself.
***
Sir Hugh Allan, who once attended Evensong, mistook him for a bassoon.
***
“Wait till we’re through the lock.”
If you’ve got anything to say, it might as well be said in a lock as out of it, I thought.
***
I reckon that if I could really bring myself to believe she didn’t exist—well, she wouldn’t exist. But that’s damned hard when you see her sitting in the Bishop’s Throne with a fifteen-inch hat.”
***
“Swans are funny creatures. I wouldn’t trust a swan with a five-pound note. No, I wouldn’t.”
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She doesn’t understand the sort of things father and I talk about. Not that we understand them ourselves, as a matter of fact.
***
It wasn’t at all an easy question to answer. If I had it in an examination, I don’t suppose I should be able to fill up both sides of the paper.
***
She was asked to open a Conservative bazaar and she opened it damn well; I wandered in there after she had left and I had the strongest feeling that it was the best-opened bazaar I had ever been to. Not a bit of it was closed, you could see that.
***
Another matter brought her bang into the middle of Cornford, between the “n” and the “f” as you might say.
***
“Here, old boy, don’t go on like this.”
“I will go on like this.”
But instead of going on like that, I turned suddenly and went out of the bar.
***
"/Atalanta in Calydon/ was written entirely with arrows, Miss Hargreaves. He'd take the manuscript, pin it to the board, and fire at it. Any words that the arrows pierced, he'd take out."
***
Canon Auty, it was said, had first met his wife on a mountain in Switzerland, where he found her presiding over an impending avalanche.
***
Canon Auty... stroked his beard reflectively as though there, and only there, could a good time be found.
***
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