The Great Automatic Grammatizator Quotes

‘The quality may be inferior, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the cost of production that counts. And stories—well—they’re just another product, like carpets and chairs, and no one cares how you produce them so long as you deliver the goods.’

‘For example, there’s a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. [...] There’ll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose.’

‘Where?’

‘In the “word-memory” section,’ he said, epexegetically.

Give us strength, Oh Lord, to let our children starve.

America is the land of opportunities for women. Already they own about eighty-four per cent of the wealth of the nation. Soon they will have it all.

‘I’m afraid you mustn’t expect anything else for Christmas. Fifty dollars was rather more than I was going to spend anyway.’

‘I’ll say it again, Tibbs. You’re talking hogwash. The vinegar don’t spoil my palate one bit.’

‘You are very fortunate, sir,’ the butler murmured, backing out of the room.

It seemed he was already trying to make something out of this, and to embarrass the boy, and at the same time I had the feeling he was relishing a private little secret all on his own.

[...] and in one corner he spotted a large parrot in a cage. Animals were usually a good sign in a place like this, Billy told himself.

‘I stuff all my little pets myself when they pass away. Will you have another cup of tea?’

‘No, thank you,’ Billy said. The tea tasted faintly of bitter almonds, and he didn’t much care for it.

He didn’t want the towns and the villages. It was the comparatively isolated places, the large farmhouses and the rather dilapidated country mansions, that he was looking for.

‘And then there’s the patina,’ Mr. Boggis continued.

‘The what?’

He explained to them the meaning of this word as applied to furniture.

‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ he said, straightening up, wiping his brow. ‘That was a bloody good carpenter put this job together and I don’t care what the parson says.’

‘This will be a good lesson to you,’ she went on. ‘Never rush things. Always take your time when you are summing someone up. Then you’ll never make mistakes.’

‘There he goes,’ I said. ‘Look.’

‘Where?’

‘Over there. He’s crossing the street. Goodness, Mummy, what a hurry he’s in.’

I had a feeling that they were laughing at us, laughing at the smallness of our numbers and at the hopeless courage of the pilots. I felt that it was the mountains, not us, who were the clever ones.

I saw Katina standing right in the middle of the field, standing firmly with her legs astride and her back to us, looking up at the Germans as they dived past. I have never seen anything smaller and more angry and more fierce in my life.

The next moment I shall never forget. On every side, as if by magic, men appeared out of the ground. They swarmed out of their trenches and like a crazy mob poured on to the aerodrome, running towards the tiny little bundle, which lay motionless in the middle of the field.

And one thing he must have known—that she would never dare to call out and tell him to hurry. He had disciplined her too well for that.

A peculiar hardness had settled itself upon the features. The little mouth, usually so flabby, was now tight and thin, the eyes were bright, and the voice, when she spoke, carried a new note of authority.

‘Hurry, driver, hurry!’

She waited, but there was no answer. Just to make sure, she rang again, and she could hear it tinkling shrilly far away in the pantry, at the back of the house. But still no one came.

So she took out her own key and opened the door herself.

‘I don’t care what it is,’ she said. ‘You can’t go putting foreign bodies like that into a tiny baby’s milk. You must be mad.’

‘It’s perfectly harmless, Mabel, otherwise I wouldn’t have done it. It comes from bees.’

‘We can’t do that.’

‘Write it down. And charge two thousand five hundred bucks. You’d do it all right if old Womberg were to offer you that much.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose I would.’ And I wrote it down.

In his heart he knew that he was not really much more than a bookmaker [...] and he knew that his friends knew it, too. So he was seeking now to become a man of culture, to cultivate a literary and aesthetic taste, to collect paintings, music, books, and all the rest of it.

‘Why the study?’

‘Acquiring room temperature, of course. It’s been there twenty-four hours.’

‘But why the study?’

‘It’s the best place in the house. Richard helped me choose it last time he was here.’

The nostrils for example were very odd, somehow more open, more flaring than any I had seen before, and excessively arched. This gave the whole nose a kind of open, snorting look that had something of the wild animal about it—the mustang.

Lady Turton’s head was there too, still sticking through the hole, but her face had turned a terrible ashy grey, and the mouth was opening and shutting making a kind of gurgling sound.