I won’t have them taught out of those big history books you keep bringing home from the library

[']And as for history, keep on with the Hundred Page History of Britain. I won’t have them taught out of those big history books you keep bringing home from the library. I opened one of those books the other day, and the first thing I saw was a piece where it said the English had been beaten in some battle or other. There’s a nice thing to go teaching children! The parents won’t stand for that kind of thing, I can tell you!’

G. Orwell, A Clergyman's daughter (1935), 237-8

He ought never to have been born into the modern world

The secret of his almost unfailing ill humour really lay in the fact that he was an anachronism. He ought never to have been born into the modern world; its whole atmosphere disgusted and infuriated him. A couple of centuries earlier, a happy pluralist writing poems or collecting fossils while curates at 40 pounds a year administered his parishes, he would have been perfectly at home. Even now, if he had been a richer man, he might have consoled himself by shutting the twentieth century out of his consciousness. But to live in past ages is very expensive; you can’t do it on less than two thousand a year. The Rector, tethered by his poverty to the age of Lenin and the Daily Mail, was kept in a state of chronic exasperation

G. Orwell, A Clergyman's daughter (1935), 17

Either he'll remain single - or he'll find himself an utterly stupid wife

Such a brilliant fellow [Joseph Olbrich]. Either he'll remain single - or he'll find himself an utterly stupid wife. That's how thinks go. you only have to take a look at other celebrated artists.

Alma Mahler-Werfel, Diaries 1898-1902. Ed. & tr. A. Beaumont (1998), 247 (Sun 11 February 1900)