“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
See more on GoodReads
“She didn't want to be considered a woman yet, wasn't ready to be the recipient of jewelry from men.”
― Sarah Blakley-Cartwright, quote from Red Riding Hood
“One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.”
― Alan Bennett, quote from The History Boys
“But faith is so easy to hold onto when you don't need it. And so hard to find when you do.”
― Malorie Blackman, quote from Checkmate
“C'est dans l'extraordinaire que je me sens le plus naturel.”
― André Gide, quote from The Counterfeiters
“Maybe Jeff Haugh wouldn’t speak to him in school that day. But it wouldn’t matter. Stephen stared out over his ice-shrouded neighborhood and realized that what had happened the previous night was inviolable; it could not be taken from him the way his childhood had been. Jeff Haugh’s arms and lips had held him, and no words or actions could undo that. Jeff Haugh. Stephen rolled the name back and forth in his head. He found himself unable to think of him as just Jeff. His full name seemed more appropriate. With Jeff Haugh in his history, Stephen would always be part of something beyond his window. He”
― Christopher Rice, quote from A Density of Souls
Flight Behavior
Shades of Blood
Twenty-Eight and a H...
Fantastic Beasts and...
Couples
Better Than Sex: Con...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
