“It's an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don't want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it. If they were merely indifferent it would be natural and understandable. But it is much stronger than that, much more positive. They are annoyed.
Very odd, isn't it.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“The truth of anything at all doesn't lie in someone's account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper, the sale of a house, the price of a ring.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“That is why historians surprise me. They seem to have no talent for the likeliness of any situation. They see history like a peepshow; with two-dimensional figures against a distant background.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“Grant had dealt too long with the human intelligence to accept as truth someone's report of someone's report of what that someone remembered to have seen or been told.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn't, of course. It's a small niggling thing.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“Alan Grant: "There are... far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It's a horrible thought."
The Midget (his nurse): "You sound constipated.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“The Sweat and the Furrow was Silas Weekley being earthly and spade-conscious all over seven hundred pages. The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas's last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the the hayloft, everyone else lying low in the barn. The rain dripped from the thatch, and the manure steamed in the midden. Silas never omitted the manure. It was not Silas's fault that its steam provided the only uprising element in the picture. If Silas could have discovered a brand of steam that steamed downwards, Silas would have introduced it.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“He knew by heart every last minute crack on its surface. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them; rivers, islands, and continents. He had made guessing games of it and discovered hidden objects; faces, birds, and fishes. He made mathematical calculations of it and rediscovered his childhood; theorems, angles, and triangles. There was practically nothing else he could do but look at it. He hated the sight of it.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“Next Christmas he was going to open this shabby sack of hers... and put something in the money compartment. She would fritter it away, of course, in small unimportances; so that in the end she would not know what she had done with it; but perhaps a series of small satisfactions scattered like sequins over the texture of everyday life was of greater worth than the academic satisfaction of owning a collection of fine objects at the back of a drawer.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“It’s an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don’t want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“If Richard had not made friends he had certainly influenced people.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“There are far too many people born into the world, and far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It’s a horrible thought.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“What happened in 1603?” Grant asked, his mind still on Tyrrel. “We had the Scots tied to our tails for good.” “Better than having them at our throats every five minutes.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas’s last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the hayloft, everyone else lying low in the barn.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“I’m a plain man, I am; no nonsense about me.’ And no manners, grace, or generosity, either.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“Grant paused in the act of turning the thing over, to consider the face a moment longer. A judge? A soldier? A prince? Someone used to great responsibility, and responsible in his authority. Someone too-conscientious. A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist. A man at ease in a large design, but anxious over details. A candidate for gastric ulcer. Someone, too, who had suffered ill-health as a child. He had that incommunicable, that indescribable look that childhood suffering leaves behind it; less positive than the look on a cripple’s face, but as inescapable. This the artist had both understood and translated into terms of paint. The slight fullness of the lower eyelid, like a child that has slept too heavily; the texture of the skin; the old-man look in a young face.
He turned the portrait over to look for a caption.
On the back was printed: Richard the Third. From the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. Artist Unknown.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“A man--Buck--wrote a vindication in the seventeenth-century, and Horace Walpole in the eighteenth, and someone named Markham in the nineteenth ... "
"And who in the twentieth?"
"No one that I know of."
"Then what's wrong with your doing it?"
"But it wont' be the same, don't you see? It won't be a great discovery."
He said it in capitals. A GREAT DISCOVERY.
Grant smiled at him.
"Oh, come, you can't expect to pick GREAT DISCOVERIES off bushes. If you can't be a pioneer what's wrong with leading a crusade?"
"A crusade?
"Certainly."
"Against what?"
"Tonypandy.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“There are far too many people born into the world, and far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It’s a horrible thought.” “You sound constipated,” said The Midget.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“La verdad es la hija del tiempo.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“If there is anything that is likely to put me to sleep,” he said, “it would be an English history book. So you can hold hands with a clear conscience.” “I’m going with Nurse Burrows.” “You can still hold hands.” “I’ve no patience with you,” she said patiently and faded backwards into the gloom.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“Silas’s last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the hayloft, everyone else lying low in the barn. The rain dripped from the thatch, and the manure steamed in the midden. Silas never omitted the manure.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn’t, of course. It’s a small niggling thing.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“But it seemed that that would spoil the symmetry of the room, and in hospitals symmetry ranked just a short head behind cleanliness and a whole length in front of Godliness.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“Cromwell started that inverted snobbery from which we are all suffering today. ‘I’m a plain man, I am; no nonsense about me.’ And no manners, grace, or generosity, either.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“The sorrows of humanity are no one’s sorrows, as newspaper readers long ago found out. A frisson of horror may go down one’s spine at wholesale destruction but one’s heart stays unmoved. A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
“perhaps a series of small satisfactions scattered like sequins over the texture of everyday life was of greater worth than the academic satisfaction of owning a collection of fine objects at the back of a drawer. When”
― Josephine Tey, quote from The Daughter of Time
Josephine Tey
Born place: in Inverness, Scotland, The United Kingdom
Born date July 25, 1896
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“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed....Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”
― Elie Wiesel, quote from Night
“No space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused”
― Charles Dickens, quote from A Christmas Carol
“He shouldn't have said that," repeated Adrian, eerily serious. He leaned his face toward mine. "I don't care if he's not the emotional type or the complimentary type or what. No one can look at you in this dress, in all that fire and gold, and start talking about anachronisms. If I were him, I would have said, 'You are the most beautiful creature I have ever seen walking this earth.”
― Richelle Mead, quote from The Golden Lily
“You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“Because humans are complicated beasts, the monster said. How can a queen be both a good witch and a bad witch? How can a prince be a murderer and a saviour? How can an apothecary be evil-tempered but right-thinking? How can a parson be wrong-thinking but good-hearted? How can invisible men make themselves more lonely by being seen?
"I don't know," Connor shrugged, exhausted. "Your stories never made any sense to me."
The answer is that it does not matter what you think, the monster said, because your mind will contradict itself a hundred times each day. You wanted her to go at the same time you were desperate for me to save her. Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from A Monster Calls
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