Quotes from Venetia

“As soon as one promises not to do something, it becomes the one thing above all others that one most wishes to do.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“There is nothing so mortifying as to fall in love with someone who does not share one's sentiments.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“O God, I love you to the edge of madness, Venetia, but I'm not mad yet--not so mad that I don't know how disastrous it might be to you--to us both! You don't realize what an advantage I should be taking of your innocence!”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“I don't know what you may have seen fit to tell her, Venetia, but so far as I understand it you could think of nothing better to do than to beguile her with some farrago about wishing Damerel to strew rose-leaves for you to walk on!"
Damerel, who had resumed his seat, had been staring moodily into the fire, but at these words he looked up quickly. "Rose-leaves?" His eyes went to Venetia's face, wickedly quizzing her. "But my dear girl, at this season?"
"Be quiet, you wretch!" she said, blushing.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“Fair Fatality, you are the most unusual female I have encountered in all my thirty-eight years!" "You can't think how deeply flattered I am!" she assured him. "I daresay my head would be quite turned if I didn't suspect that amongst so many a dozen or so may have slipped from your memory.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“His attention caught, her companion raised his eyes from the book which lay open beside him on the table and directed them upon her in a look of aloof enquiry. 'What's that? Did you say something to me, Venetia?'
'Yes, love,' responded his sister cheerfully, 'but it wasn't of the least consequence, and in any event I answered for you. You would be astonished, I daresay, if you knew what interesting conversations I enjoy with myself.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“...Gentlemen don't understand anything, however wise they may be.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“This, said Damerel wrathfully, is the second time you have walked in just as I am about to propose to your sister!”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“Goodbye!" "Oh, not goodbye!" he protested. "I mean to know you better, Miss Lanyon of Undershaw!" "To be sure, it does seem a pity you should not, after such a promising start, but life, you know, is full of disappointments, and that, I must warn you, is likely to prove one of them.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“The more enchanted the idyll, greater must be the pain of its ending.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“How very odd, to be sure!’ ‘What is?’ She walked on, her brow a little furrowed. ‘Wishing to kiss someone you never saw before in your life. It seems quite mad-brained to me, besides showing a sad want of particularity.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“Morals and medicine warred within his breast, and medicine won the day- but I dare say morals may give him a sleepless night.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“Perhaps you have friends already who laugh when you do,’ she said diffidently. ‘I haven’t, and it’s important, I think – more important than sympathy in affliction, which you might easily find in someone you positively disliked.’ ‘But to share a sense of the ridiculous prohibits dislike – yes, that’s true. And rare!”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“Yes, love," responded his sister cheerfully, "but it wasn't of the least consequence, and in any event I answered for you. You would be astonished, I daresay, if you knew what interesting conversations I enjoy with myself.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“I don’t think I am green. It’s true I only know what I’ve read in books, but I’ve read a great many books”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“there was something very taking in her face which owed nothing to the excellence of her features: an expression of sweetness, a sparkle of irrepressible fun, an unusually open look, quite devoid of self-consciousness.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“In all of this she was only partially successful, for although Nurse knew that once Miss Venetia had made up her mind she was powerless to prevent her doing whatever she liked, and was obliged to admit some faint resemblance in Damerel to the Good Samaritan, she persisted in referring to him as The Ungodly, and in ascribing his charitable behaviour to some obscure but evil motive. She”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“Mrs Hendred did not like the people around her to be unhappy. Even the sight of a housemaid crying with the pain of the toothache made her feel low, for misery had no place in her comfortable existence; and when it obtruded itself on her notice it dimmed the warm sunshine in which she basked, and quite ruined her belief in a world where everyone was contented, and affluent, and cheerful.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“But that’s what he did, and if he has made up his mind to be idiotishly noble – Yes, it is going to be very difficult. I must think!”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“Venetia had no guile, and no affectations; she knew the world only by the books she had read; experience had never taught her to doubt the sincerity of anyone who did her a kindness.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“It was like a bad dream, in which people one knew quite well behaved fantastically, and one was powerless to escape from some dreadful doom.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“Men – witness all the histories! – were subject to sudden lusts and violences, affairs that seemed strangely divorced from heart or head, and often more strangely still from what were surely their true characters. For them chastity was not a prime virtue: she remembered her amazement when she had discovered that so correct a gentleman and kind a husband as Sir John Denny had not always been faithful to his lady. Had Lady Denny cared? A little, perhaps, but she had not allowed it to blight her marriage. ‘Men, my love, are different from us,’ she had said once, ‘even the best of them! I tell you this because I hold it to be very wrong to rear girls in the belief that the face men show to the females they respect is their only one. I daresay, if we were to see them watching some horrid, vulgar prize-fight, or in company with women of a certain class, we shouldn’t recognise our own husbands and brothers. I am very sure we should think them disgusting!”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“There was nothing in store at Undershaw for his lordship but a set-down, but it was disappointing to be granted no opportunity to deliver this.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“These were all things which a youth chafing against the restrictions of a polite age admired: but when he met them in a rival he bitterly resented them, because he knew himself to be at a disadvantage, playing the Corsair’s rôle in front of the Corsair himself. Had”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“They must have had a great deal of practice, though I don’t think it can be wholly due to practice, do you? I never met a rake before, or thought much about it, but I should suppose that a man could scarcely become one – well, not a very successful one, at all events – if he were not naturally engaging.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“The most she could wring from him was a promise that he would say nothing uncivil to Mrs Scorrier unless she offered him provocation, and with this she had to try at least to be satisfied. But as what Aubrey might regard as provocation depended to a large extent upon his mood her expectations were not high;”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“The end of the idyll was implicit in the beginning: I at least knew that, though you might not. And also that the more enchanted the idyll the greater must be the pain of its ending. That won’t endure. Hearts don’t really break, you know.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“it is so stupid to say, as Edward does, that Aubrey ought to like what he detests, because other boys do. Aubrey is himself, and no one can alter him, so what is the use of saying he ought, when he won’t?”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“Mrs Hendred was a very pretty woman of great good-nature and much less than commonsense.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

“She could only marvel at him. She had never possessed the key to his mind, and what circumstance it was that made him now so calmly confident was beyond her power to fathom. She did not believe him to be desperately in love with her; she could only suppose that having once made up his mind that she was the wife that would best suit him he had either grown too accustomed to the idea to be able easily to relinquish it, or that the good opinion he had of himself made it impossible for him to believe that she could in all seriousness reject his offer.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Venetia

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Popular quotes

“A man can only do a given thing so many times with freshness and spirit--then, no matter what it is, it becomes like an office task. I enjoy cards and whoring, but even cards and whoring can grow boresome. You tup your wife a thousand times and that becomes an office task, too.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Comanche Moon

“This morning, thanks to a controlled near-death experience, I was lucky enough to meet, at the far end of the blue tunnel, a man named Salvatore Biagini. Last July 8th, Mr. Biagini, a retired construction worker, age seventy, suffered a fatal heart attack while rescuing his beloved schnauzer, Teddy, from an assault by an unrestrained pit bull named Chele, in Queens.

The pit bull, with no previous record of violence against man or beast, jumped a four-foot fence in order to have at Teddy. Mr. Biagini, an unarmed man with a history of heart trouble, grabbed him, allowing the schnauzer to run away. So the pit bull bit Mr. Biagini in several places and then Mr. Biagini's heart quit beating, never to beat again. I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagini was philosophical. He said it sure as heck beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

“What did I want? I wanted a Roc's egg. I wanted a harem loaded with lovely odalisques less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never stained my sword. I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist, and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies! I wanted to get up feeling brisk and go out and break some lances, then pick a likely wench for my droit du seigneur - I wanted to stand up to the Baron and dare him to touch my wench! I wanted to hear the purple water chuckling against the skin of the Nancy Lee in the cool of the morning watch and not another sound, nor any movement save the slow tilting of the wings of the albatross that had been pacing us the last thousand miles. I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, "The game's afoot!" I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and Lost Dauphin. I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and to eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be the way they had promised me it was going to be, instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is. I had had one chance - for ten minutes yesterday afternoon. Helen of Troy, whatever your true name may be - and I had known it and I had let it slip away. Maybe one chance is all you ever get.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from Glory Road

“You're the only treasure I'll ever need.”
― Jade Parker, quote from To Catch a Pirate

“When a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping to go in a straight line.”
― Samuel Beckett, quote from Molloy

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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.

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