Quotes from All Things Bright and Beautiful

James Herriot ·  378 pages

Rating: (61.1K votes)


“back of the tongue and into the mouth, and when it came within”
― James Herriot, quote from All Things Bright and Beautiful


“That ewe's life had been saved not by medicinal therapy but simply by stopping her pain and allowing nature to do its own job of healing. It was a lesson I have never forgotten; the animals confronted with severe continuous pain and the terror and shock that goes with it will often retreat even into death, and if you can remove that pain amazing things can happen. It is difficult to explain rationally but I know that it is so.”
― James Herriot, quote from All Things Bright and Beautiful


“Sometimes in our job you feel you just can't win. If you take too long you're no good, if you're too quick the visit wasn't necessary.”
― James Herriot, quote from All Things Bright and Beautiful


“As I trailed dumbly up the next flight it seemed strange that we had never said goodbye. We didn’t know when, if ever, we would see each other again yet neither of us had said a word. I don’t know if Siegfried wanted to say anything but there was a lot try trying to burst from me.
I wanted to thank him for being a friend as well as a boss, for teaching me so much, for never letting me down. There were other things, too, but I never said them.
Come to think of it, I’ve never even thanked him for that fifty pounds…until now.”
― James Herriot, quote from All Things Bright and Beautiful


“couldn’t be persuaded to part with him.”
― James Herriot, quote from All Things Bright and Beautiful



About the author

James Herriot
Born place: in Sunderland, The United Kingdom
Born date October 3, 1916
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“Let us define our terms. A woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac, she is simply a woman in love. But my friend who xeroxes his love letters so he can publish them someday--my friend is a graphomaniac. Graphomania is not a desire to write letters, diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one's immediate family); it is a desire to write books (to have a public of unknown readers). In this sense the taxi driver and Goethe share the same passion. What distinguishes Goethe from the taxi driver is the result of the passion, not the passion itself.

"Graphomania (an obsession with writing books) takes on the proportions of a mass epidemic whenever a society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions:

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