Cakes and Ale quotes

I have noticed that when someone asks for you on the telephone and, finding you out, leaves a message begging you to call him up the moment you come in, and it’s important, the matter is more often important to him than to you.

When it comes to making you a present or doing you a favour most people are able to hold their impatience within reasonable bounds.

I had watched with admiration his rise in the world of letters. His career might well have served as a model for any young man entering upon the pursuit of literature.

I could think of no one among my contemporaries who had achieved so considerable a position on so little talent.

This, like the wise man’s daily dose of Bemax, might have gone into a heaped-up tablespoon.

Smith was wrong here. The most shining characteristic of Alroy Kear was his sincerity. No one can be a humbug for five-and-twenty years.

Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit.

It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it is a whole-time job. It needs also a cynical humour;

Though I have finished few of his novels, I have begun a good many, and to my mind his sincerity is stamped on every one of their multitudinous pages. This is clearly the chief ground of his stable popularity.

Roy has always sincerely believed what everyone else believed at the moment.

When he wrote novels about the aristocracy he sincerely believed that its members were dissipated and immoral, and yet had a certain nobility and an innate aptitude for governing the British Empire;

“Do you remember at all what she was like?”

“Yes, very distinctly,” I smiled. “She was sweet.”

Roy gave a short laugh.

… I did not know if I imagined or heard (my house was at the top of Half Moon Street), and the beauty of the sunny June day (le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui), gave my reverie a poignancy which was not quite painful.

The past I looked at seemed to have lost its reality and I saw it as though it were a scene in a play and I a spectator in the back row of a dark gallery.

But it was all very clear as far as it went.

“Crushing. I wonder they don’t see that themselves.”

“Poor wretches, they often suffer from the delusion that people find them interesting,” I murmured.

We reached Tercanbury, dropped the duchess at the station, and drove on.

Driffield. Though I knew theoretically what people did when they were married, and was capable of putting the facts in the bluntest language, I did not really understand it. I thought it indeed rather disgusting and I did not quite, quite believe it.

After all, I was aware that the earth was round, but I knew it was flat.

Mrs. Driffield seemed so frank, her laugh was so open and simple, there was in her demeanour something so young and childlike, that I could not see her “going with” sailors and above all anyone so gross and horrible as Lord George.

Roy Kear, when he was talking to me of Driffield, claimed that, whatever his faults, they were redeemed by the beauty that suffused his pages. Now I come to look back on our conversation, I think it was this remark that had most exasperated me.

Thirty years ago in literary circles God was all the fashion.

It was good form to believe and journalists used him to adorn a phrase or balance a sentence; then God went out (oddly enough with cricket and beer) and Pan came in. In a hundred novels his cloven hoof left its imprint on the sward;

No one has ever been able to explain why the Doric temple of Paestum is more beautiful than a glass of cold beer except by bringing in considerations that have nothing to do with beauty.

Beauty is a blind alley. It is a mountain peak which once reached leads nowhere.

That is why in the end we find more to entrance us in El Greco than in Titian, in the incomplete achievement of Shakespeare than in the consummate success of Racine. Too much has been written about beauty.

Too much has been written about beauty. That is why I have written a little more. Beauty is that which satisfies the aesthetic instinct. But who wants to be satisfied? It is only to the dullard that enough is as good as a feast.

Let us face it: beauty is a bit of a bore.

But of course what the critics wrote about Edward Driffield was eyewash.

But of course what the critics wrote about Edward Driffield was eyewash.

His outstanding merit was not the realism that gave vigour to his work, nor the beauty that informed it, nor his graphic portraits of seafaring men, nor his poetic descriptions of salty marshes, of storm and calm and of nestling hamlets; it was his longevity.

Reverence for old age is one of the most admirable traits of the human race and I think it may safely be stated that in no other country than ours is this trait more marked.

“Oh, I couldn’t. Amy Driffield would never speak to me again. She only asked me to do the life because she felt she could trust my discretion. I must behave like a gentleman.”

“It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.”

“I don’t see why. And besides, you know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you’re cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

You know, however gross a subject is you can soften its unpleasantness if you treat it with dignity. But I can do nothing unless I am in complete possession of the facts.”

“Obviously you can’t cook them unless you have them.”

Roy had been expressing himself with a fluent ease that revealed the successful lecturer. I wished (a) that I could express myself with so much force and aptness, never at a loss for a word, rolling off the sentences without a moment’s hesitation;

“This is where you come in, old boy,” he said pleasantly.

I have always found it a very good plan in life to say nothing when I had nothing to say and when I do not know how to answer a remark to hold my tongue.

I remained silent and looked back at Roy amiably.

I saw that Roy was not inclined to be amused. I was not annoyed, for I am quite used to people not being amused at my jokes.

I often think that the purest type of the artist is the humorist who laughs alone at his own jests.

“And you saw a good deal of him later on in London, I believe.”

“I don’t know as there is, now you come to speak of it, except me ’ealth and strength for another twenty years so as I can go on workin’.”

I do not think I am a sentimentalist, but her reply, unexpected but so characteristic, made a sudden lump come to my throat.

When it was time for me to go I asked if I could see the rooms I had lived in for five years.

What I obscurely (and rather shamefacedly) felt, communicated itself to Mrs. Hudson, for she gave a laugh and with a characteristic gesture rubbed her prominent nose.

“My word, people are funny,” she said.

“When I think of all the gentlemen I’ve ’ad here, I give you my word you wouldn’t believe it if I told you some of the things I know about them. One of them’s funnier than the other.

She was said to have been unhappily married in early life, but now for many years had been congenially united to Barton Trafford, a clerk in the Home Office and a well known authority on prehistoric man.

She gave you the curious impression of having no bones in her body and you felt that if you pinched her shin (which of course my respect for her sex as well as something of quiet dignity in her appearance would have never allowed me to do) your fingers would meet.

When you took her hand it was like taking a fillet of sole. Her face, notwithstanding its large features, had something fluid about it. When she sat it was as though she had no backbone and were stuffed, like an expensive cushion, with swansdown.

… of having no bones in her body and you felt that if you pinched her shin (which of course my respect for her sex as well as something of quiet dignity in her appearance would have never allowed me to do) your fingers would meet.

When you took her hand it was like taking a fillet of sole.

Her face, notwithstanding its large features, had something fluid about it. When she sat it was as though she had no backbone and were stuffed, like an expensive cushion, with swansdown.

When you took her hand it was like taking a fillet of sole. Her face, notwithstanding its large features, had something fluid about it. When she sat it was as though she had no backbone and were stuffed, like an expensive cushion, with swansdown.

Everything was soft about her, her voice, her smile, her laugh; her eyes, which were small and pale, had the softness of flowers; her manner was as soft as the summer rain.

It was this extraordinary, and charming, characteristic that made her the wonderful friend she was. It was this that had gained her the celebrity that she now enjoyed.

But there was no doubt about it. She would say nothing against him, indeed she would not discuss him at all, and when mention was made of him she merely smiled, a little sadly, and sighed.

But her smile was the coup de grâce, and her sigh buried him deep.

Mrs. Barton Trafford had a passion for literature too sincere to allow a setback of this character long to discourage her;

She offered him her friendship. He could not fail to be moved when, in that gentle way of hers, she told him that it was a scandal that his exquisite work remained known only in a narrow circle. He was pleased and flattered.

It is always pleasant to be assured that you are a genius.

She told him that Barton Trafford was reflecting on the possibility of writing an important article on him for the Quarterly Review. She asked him to luncheon to meet people who might be useful to him. She wanted him to know his intellectual equals.

“Rotten,” he said. “What can a photograph give of Rosie? The thing about her is her colour.” He turned to her. “Rosie, don’t you know that your colour is the great miracle of the age?”

She looked at him without answering, but her full red lips broke into their childlike, mischievous smile.

“If I can only get a suggestion of it I’m made for life,” he said. “All the rich stockbrokers’ wives will come on their bended knees and beg me to paint them like you.”

He was a man of five and thirty and of a flamboyant appearance.

He looked like a portrait of Van Dyck in which the distinction had been replaced by good humour.

He was slightly above the middle height, slim; and he had a fine mane of black hair and flowing moustaches and a pointed beard. He favoured broad-brimmed sombreros and Spanish capes.

I knew what he meant.

She glowed, but palely, like the moon rather than the sun, or if it was like the sun it was like the sun in the white mist of dawn.

Hillier had placed her in the middle of his canvas and she stood, with her arms by her sides, the palms of her hands toward you and her head a little thrown back, in an attitude that gave value to the pearly beauty of her …

She was never a great talker. Often when, the night being fine, we decided to walk back from the music hall at which we had been spending the evening, she never opened her mouth.

But her silence was intimate and comfortable.

It did not exclude you from thoughts that engaged her apart from you; it included you in a pervasive well-being.

In the starlight Rosie’s face and her fair hair glowed softly. She was suffused, as it were (I express it awkwardly, but I do not know how to describe the emotion she gave me) with a friendliness at once candid and tender.

She was like a silvery flower of the night that only gave its perfume to the moonbeams.

I slipped my arm round her waist and she turned her face to mine. This time it was I who kissed. She did not move;

“Mercifully he’s not staying long.” Quentin Forde pursed his lips and raised his black eyebrows; with his white hair and long sallow face he looked incredibly gentlemanly. “

Women are always the same; they adore a bounder.

”

I could only feel against my arm the smoothness of the sable cape; I could only see her fingers forever stroking the muff. I could have borne the thought of the others; it was Jack Kuyper who horrified me. How could she?

It was abominable to be poor.

I longed to have enough money to tell her that if she would send the fellow back his beastly furs I would give her better ones instead. At last she noticed that I did not speak.

“Well, then. It’s so silly to be fussy and jealous. Why not be happy with what you can get?

Enjoy yourself while you have the chance, I say; we shall all be dead in a hundred years and what will anything matter then?

Let’s have a good time while we can.”

“

You must take me as I am, you know,

” she whispered.

It has a cold ruthlessness that in all the sentimentality of English fiction strikes an original note. It is refreshing and astringent.

It tastes of tart apples. It sets your teeth on edge, but it has a subtle, bittersweet savour that is very agreeable to the palate.

Of all Driffield’s books it is the only one I should like to have written.

“The thought occurred to me, but I noticed that he did not run in the direction of the river, but plunged into the meaner streets of the neighbourhood in which we had been walking. And

I reflected also that there is no example in literary history of an author committing suicide while engaged on the composition of a literary work.

Whatever his tribulations, he is unwilling to leave to posterity an uncompleted opus.”

I recognized the names over the shops, the Kentish names that have been borne for centuries—the Ganns, the Kemps, the Cobbs, the Igguldens—but I saw no one that I knew.

I felt like a ghost walking down that street where I had once known nearly everyone, if not to speak to, at least by sight.

Suddenly a very shabby little car passed me, stopped, and backed, and I saw someone looking at me curiously. A tall, heavy elderly man got out and came toward me.

This was a rank odour of stables and of stale straw that lay at the bottom of the carriage; and I wondered in vain why, after all these years, the motor car should have it too.

But nothing can bring back the past like a perfume or a stench

, and, oblivious to the country I was trundling through, I saw myself once more a little boy on the front seat with the communion plate beside me and, facing me, my aunt, smelling slightly of clean linen and eau de cologne, in her black …

“You don’t know America as well as I do,” he said. “

They always prefer a live mouse to a dead lion.

That’s one of the reasons why I like America.”

“Well, then, the act of love. She was naturally affectionate. When she liked anyone it was quite natural for her to go to bed with him. She never thought twice about it. It was not vice; it wasn’t lasciviousness; it was her nature.

She gave herself as naturally as the sun gives heat or the flowers their perfume.

It was a pleasure to her and she liked to give pleasure to others. It had no effect on her character; she remained sincere, unspoiled, and artless.”

“I think I can tell you. You see, she wasn’t a woman who ever inspired love. Only affection. It was absurd to be jealous over her.

She was like a clear deep pool in a forest glade into which it’s heavenly to plunge, but it is neither less cool nor less crystalline because a tramp and a gipsy and a gamekeeper have plunged into it before you.

”

I have noticed that when I am most serious people are apt to laugh at me, and indeed when after a lapse of time I have read passages that I wrote from the fullness of my heart I have been tempted to laugh at myself.

It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind.

I saw that Mrs. Driffield wished to ask me something. It caused her a certain embarrassment.

As I walked along the winding road, meeting no one by the way, I mused upon what I should say.

Do they not tell us that style is the art of omission?

If that is so I should certainly write a very pretty piece, and it seemed almost a pity that Roy should use it only as material. I chuckled when I reflected what a bombshell I could throw if I chose.

I chuckled when I reflected what a bombshell I could throw if I chose. There was one person who could tell them all they wanted to know about Edward Driffield and his first marriage; but this fact I proposed to keep to myself.

They thought Rosie was dead; they erred; Rosie was very much alive.

Being in New York for the production of a play and my arrival having been advertised to all and sundry by my manager’s energetic press representative, I received one day a letter addressed in a handwriting I knew but could not place.

” She gave me a smile, and I had a sudden inkling that, notwithstanding the marcelled hair and the powder and the fat, Rosie was the same as ever. “

But what I say is: A little of what you fancy does you good.

”

I smiled, but I understood what she meant. Notwithstanding its trams and its tootling cars, its cinemas and electric signs,

Yonkers, with its winding main street, has a faint air of an English market town gone jazz.

“Of course I sometimes wonder what’s happened to all the folks at Blackstable. I suppose they’re most of them dead by now and I expect they think I am too.”