“You cannot argue stupidity, you just have to accept it patiently as one of those things.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Round the Bend
“You can only do a thing for the first time once, and that goes for falling in love.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Round the Bend
“I have been asked sometimes what led me to the Persian Gulf, what instinct told me that I could build up a business there. It’s really perfectly simple. If you go to the hottest and most uncomfortable place on the map you’ll find there’s not a lot of competition;”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Round the Bend
“An American, a soldier of fortune by profession. Wherever there is trouble in the world the Dwights of all nations foregather. There are not very many of them, thirty or forty perhaps, and they are all supremely competent men because the others have been killed.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Round the Bend
“We are not like that, we engineers. We are men of understanding and of education, on whom is laid responsibility that men may travel in these aeroplanes as safely as if they were sitting by the well in the cool of the evening.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Round the Bend
“Half a thou too small,” he said. “The difference between Right and Wrong. Half a thou bigger, and it’ld be Right. As it is, it’s Wrong, and you can’t cheat about it.” He smiled again. “Too bad when God gives you the mind of an Inspector, isn’t it?”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Round the Bend
“When a good man employs others he becomes a slave to the job, for the job is the guarantee for the security of many men.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Round the Bend
“Many evils spring from power,” he said. “Even from the power to do good. All power corrupts, and the intention to do good has little influence on the corruption. Either my words will last after me and be believed by men, or else they won’t. Yet if one thing were required to kill them certainly, it is that my words should be spread after my death by the power of money. No teaching could survive a campaign of paid advertising.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Round the Bend
“I still think Connie was a human man, a very, very good one—but a man. I have been wrong in my judgments many times before; if now I am ignorant and blind, I’m sorry, but it’s no new thing. If that should be the case though, it means that I have had great privileges in my life, perhaps more so than any man alive today. Because it means that on the fields and farms of England, on the airstrips of the desert and the jungle, in the hangars of the Persian Gulf and on the tarmacs of the southern islands, I have walked and talked with God.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Round the Bend
“Only by an act of treachery to those who believe in us can either of us escape.”
― Nevil Shute, quote from Round the Bend
“Of course they don't function as gills, but five-week human embryos can be regarded as little pink fishes, with gills.”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
“Circenn moved swiftly, intending to catch the tear upon his finger, kiss it away, then kiss away all her pain and fear, and assure her that he would permit no harm to touch her and would spend his life making things up to her; but she dropped the flask onto the table and turned swiftly.
"Please, leave me alone," she said and turned away from him. "Let me comfort you, Lisa," he entreated.
"Leave me alone."
For the first time in his life, Circenn
felt utterly helpless. Let her grieve, his heart instructed. She would need to grieve, for discovering that the flask didn't work was tantamount to lowering her mother into a solitary grave. She would grieve her mother as if she'd in truth died that very day. May God
forgive me, he prayed. I did not know what I was doing when I cursed that flask.”
― Karen Marie Moning, quote from The Highlander's Touch
“You must cry out if you want help. It is no use whatsoever to suffer in silence. Who will succour the drowning man if he does not clamour for his life?”
― Kamala Markandaya, quote from Nectar in a Sieve
“Vision is also a fickle creature. You can see an object a hundred times, a thousand times, and it remains unchanged. Then in one swift second you realize it has been changing all along and your eyes hid it from you.”
― Janette Rallison, quote from My Fair Godmother
“So could we please not mob the three-thousand-plus-year-old reaper like tweens at a boy-band concert?”
― Rachel Vincent, quote from My Soul to Save
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.
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