“When you and I are dead, and all the rest of us who served in the last war, in all the countries,” she said, “there’ll be a chance of world peace. Not till then.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Requiem for a Wren
“Until we’re dead, we Service people, the world will always be in danger of another war. We had too good a time in the last one. We’ll none of us come out into the open and admit it. It might be better for us if we did. [...] For our generation, the war years were the best time of our lives, not because they were war years but because we were young. The best years of our lives happened to be war years. Everyone looks back at the time when they were in their early twenties with nostalgia, but when we look back we only see the war. We had a fine time then, and so we think that if a third war came we’d have those happy, carefree years all over again. I don’t suppose we would—some of us might.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Requiem for a Wren
“There are some things about oneself that it’s not very nice to wake up to.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Requiem for a Wren
“She said, “Aye, they’re getting for him everything the heart of man could desire, saving the one thing.” I asked, “What’s that?” She said, “A wife.” She’s very shrewd.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Requiem for a Wren
“It was incongruous at Coombargana. In a great city such things happen now and then, where people are too strained and hurried to pay much attention to the griefs of others, but in a small rural community like ours, led by wise and tolerant people such as my father and mother, staffed by good types culled and weeded out over the years, such secret, catastrophic griefs do not occur. Troubles at Coombargana had always been small troubles in my lifetime.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Requiem for a Wren
“after all that I had read during the night. Even into this quiet place the war had reached like the tentacle of an octopus and had touched this girl and brought about her death. Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after it’s all over.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Requiem for a Wren
“Throughout the autumn and the winter activity increased in the Beaulieu area, and with it came mysteries. Lepe House, the mansion at the entrance to the river, was taken over by the Navy and became full of secretive Naval officers; it became known that this was part of a mysterious Navel entity called 'Force J'. Near Lepe House and at the very mouth of the river a construction gang began work in full strength to make a hard, sloping concrete platform running down into the river where the flat-bottomed landing craft could beach to refuel and let their ramps down to embark the vehicles and tanks. This place was about two miles from 'Mastodon'. A mile or so along the coast a country house was occupied by a secret Naval party who did strange things with tugs and wires and winches, and with what looked like a gigantic reel of cotton floating in the sea; this was 'Pluto', Pipe Line Under The Ocean, which was to lay pipes from England to France to carry petrol to supply the armies which were due to land in Normandy. On a bare beach nearby a thousand navvies were camped making huge concrete structures known as 'Phoenix', one of many such sites all along the coast. It was not till after the invasion that it became known that these were a part of the artificial harbour 'Mulberry' on the north coast of France.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Requiem for a Wren
“By 1948 I was safe on my feet and able to get about quite normally, but I was thirty-four and life was slipping past me. I could not face burial alive in Coombargana at that age after all that I had been and done during the war, and I began to feel I should go crazy if I didn’t get away from it to England again, where things were happening. I think my parents understood, because they made no objection when I suggested that I should go back to Oxford for a year and finish taking my degree. That was five years ago. What I didn’t realise then was that it wasn’t England I was really fretting for. It was my lost youth.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Requiem for a Wren
“I was very depressed in those months, because it’s not funny to lose both your feet when you’re thirty years old.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Requiem for a Wren
Nevil Shute
Born place: in London, England, The United Kingdom
Born date January 17, 1899
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“I have never before considered the feelings of a cow. I suppose they must not care for us at all.’ ‘They are only dumb beasts,’ Laurence said, ‘and such thought surely beyond them. Any animal will defend its life and young, but that is not the same as being a thinking, reasoning creature.’ ‘Only, how could one be certain?’ Temeraire said. ‘After all, if one wishes to be particularly dull, one might be like that fellow Salcombe, and say that dragons are also dumb beasts. And I am quite sure the bunyips are not, though they do not seem to talk at all: they are only nasty thinking creatures. It is not very fair, though, that I should allow them to have sense because they will contrive one unpleasantness after another; what if cows are very clever, only they do not like to make a fuss about it?’ ‘If they dislike fuss enough to tolerate being eaten,’ Laurence said, with rather an amused expression, ‘surely it need not matter one way or another.’ ‘Perhaps they think they will be eaten anyway, as they are so delicious,”
― Naomi Novik, quote from Tongues of Serpents
“Pero ya lo ve, no se pueden hacer diferencias entre un robot y el mejor de los humanos.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from Roboter-Visionen
“She is the gin. Cold, intoxicating. Gives you a rush, makes you warm inside, makes you lose your head. Take too much, it makes you sick and shuts you down.
He is the coffee, hot, steaming, filtered. You have to add stuff to it to make it taste good. Grinds your stomach, makes you jittery, wired, and tense. Bad trip, keeps you up, burns you out.
Coffee and gin don’t mix, never do, everybody keeps trying and trying to make it taste good.”
― Henry Rollins, quote from See A Grown Man Cry/Now Watch Him Die
“No matter how much I fought him or gave in to him in turns, I couldn’t fuck away my fears.”
― Cassie Alexander, quote from Nightshifted
“I probably should've thought about talking to Uncle Gary a lot earlier. He's been married something like four times already, so he's an EXPERT on relationships.”
― Jeff Kinney, quote from The Third Wheel
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