“Mathias shrugged. After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances.”
― Richard Hughes, quote from A High Wind in Jamaica
“Being nearly four years old, she was certainly a child: and children are human (if one allows the term "human" a wide sense): but she had not altogether ceased to be a baby: and babies are of course not human--they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes: the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid, since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates.
In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind.
It is true that they look human--but not so human, to be quite fair, as many monkeys.
Subconsciously, too, every one recognizes they are animals--why else do people always laugh when a baby does some action resembling the human, as they would at a praying mantis? If the baby was only a less-developed man, there would be nothing funny in it, surely.”
― Richard Hughes, quote from A High Wind in Jamaica
“Laura lay on her back in the faint light of the open hatch. She had discarded her blanket; and the vest which did duty for a night-gown was rucked right up under her arms. Jonsen wondered how anything so like a frog could ever conceivably grow into the billowy body of a woman. He bent down and attempted to pull down the vest: but at the first touch Laura rolled violently over onto her stomach, then drew her knees up under her, thrusting her pointed rump up at him; and continued to sleep in that position, breathing noisily.”
― Richard Hughes, quote from A High Wind in Jamaica
“Emily and Rachel had their hair cut short, and were allowed to do everything the boys did - to climb trees, swim, and trap animals and birds: they even had two pockets in their frocks.”
― Richard Hughes, quote from A High Wind in Jamaica
“You can never count on them. They say what they think you want them to say, and then they say what the opposing council wants them to say, too, if they like his face.”
― Richard Hughes, quote from A High Wind in Jamaica
“Life seemed suddenly a little empty, for never again could there happen to her something so dangerous, so sublime.”
― Richard Hughes, quote from A High Wind in Jamaica
“It is a fact that it takes experience before one can realize what is a catastrophe and what is not. Children have little faculty of distinguishing between disaster and the ordinary course of their lives.”
― Richard Hughes, quote from A High Wind in Jamaica
“It would have surprised Mrs. Thornton very much to have been told that hitherto she had meant practically nothing to her children. She took a keen interest in Psychology (the Art Babblative, Southey calls it). She was full of theories about their upbringing which she had not time to put into effect; but nevertheless she thought she had a deep understanding of their temperaments and was the center of their passionate devotion.”
― Richard Hughes, quote from A High Wind in Jamaica
Richard Hughes
Born place: in Weybridge, Surrey, The United Kingdom
Born date April 19, 1900
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“And whether they were saintly or corrupt, scholars or scarcely able to get through the Lord’s Prayer in Latin, all society’s educated men had the Church to thank for their learning.”
― Edward Rutherfurd, quote from London
“She had a bottle of water in her pack—a big one with a squeeze-top—but suddenly all Trisha wanted in the world was to prime the pump in the little hut and get a drink, cold and fresh, from its rusty lip. She would drink and pretend she was Bilbo Baggins, on his way to the Misty Mountains.”
― Stephen King, quote from The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
“People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody's perfect.”
― Colum McCann, quote from Let the Great World Spin
“Your supposed to drink wine, my friend, not breathe it.”
― Trudi Canavan, quote from The Novice
“I feel like someone is pressing me into a mold that does not fit my body, forcing me intothe wrong shape.”
― Veronica Roth, quote from Free Four: Tobias Tells the Divergent Knife-Throwing Scene
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