“I found my mind wandering at games; loved boxing and was good at it; and in summer, having chosen rowing instead of cricket, lay peacefully by the Stour, well upstream of the rhythmic creaking and the exhortation, reading Lily Christine and Gibbon and gossiping with kindred lotus-eaters under the willow-branches.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
“At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
“[Poetry] is a field where England can take on all challengers.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
“Often, half in a bay of the mountains and half on a headland, a small and nearly amphibian Schloss mouldered in the failing light among the geese and the elder-bushes and the apple trees. Dank walls rose between towers that were topped with cones of moulting shingle. Weeds throve in every cranny. Moss mottled the walls. Fissures branched like forked lightning across damp masonry which the rusting iron clamps tried to hold together, and buttresses of brick shored up the perilously leaning walls. The mountains, delaying sunrise and hastening dusk, must have halved again the short winter days. Those buildings looked too forlorn for habitation. But, in tiny, creeper-smothered windows, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came? Immured in those six-foot-thick walls, overgrown outside with the conquering ivy and within by genealogical trees all moulting with mildew? My thoughts flew at once to solitary figures…a windowed descendant of a lady-in-waiting at the court of Charlemagne, alone with the Sacred Heart and her beads, or a family of wax-pale barons, recklessly inbred; bachelors with walrus moustaches, bent double with rheumatism, shuddering from room to room and coughing among their lurchers, while their cleft palates called to each other down corridors that were all but pitch dark.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
“I fell asleep among the beer mugs and when I woke, I couldn’t think where I was.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
“The notion that I had walked twelve hundred miles since Rotterdam filled me with a legitimate feeling of something achieved. But why should the thought that nobody knew where I was, as though I were in flight from bloodhounds or from worshipping corybants bent on dismemberment, generate such a feeling of triumph? It always did.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
“My mother was filled with apprehension to begin with; we pored over the atlas, and, bit by bit as we pored, the comic possibilities began to unfold in absurd imaginary scenes until we were falling about with laughter; and by the time I caught the train to London next morning, she was infected with my excitement.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
“I found it impossible to tear myself away from my station and plunge into Hungary. I feel the same disability now; a momentary reluctance to lay hands on this particular fragment of the future; not out of fear, but because, within arm's reach and still intact, this future seemed, and still seems, so full of promised marvels.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
Patrick Leigh Fermor
Born place: in London, The United Kingdom
Born date February 11, 1915
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“Sicarius stood behind them, not bothering to hide his face as the breeze rifled through his short blond hair. He hadn’t drawn a weapon yet, and Amaranthe hurried to catch up, to keep him from doing so.
First one security man glanced over his shoulder and jumped, then the second emulated the move.
Sespian lifted a hand. “Don’t hurt—”One of the men pointed to the side of Sicarius, cried, “Look, enforcers!” and hurled himself past Sespian and into the river. The second man squeaked, scuttled backward until his shoulders rammed against the railing, then grabbed it and also propelled himself into the water. His lantern caught and dropped to the deck instead of falling overboard. It clanked and highlighted a dubious puddle before tipping over and winking out. Amaranthe had forgotten how much Sicarius’s reputation affected the average person.”
― Lindsay Buroker, quote from Beneath the Surface
“That's how you know you're doing the right thing - it's so hard you want to give up.”
― Emily McKay, quote from The Farm
“One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Inversions
“Sure, I had been accused of murder by my family and was wrapped up in a bizarre investigation, but there were such cute boys involved. Hey, I try to look on the bright side.”
― quote from Never Bite a Boy on the First Date
“Propaganda must above all be popular, he argued; it must not be aimed toward the intelligentsia but “always and exclusively to the masses,” and its level “must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to.”
― Joachim Fest, quote from Hitler
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