A digital form of the sadly lost fashion for copying out memorable passages from texts. I kept losing my actual book.
Monday, 12 December 2022
The minstrel was known as Roland le Fartere and that the trick was to make a leap, a whistle and a fart
Sunday, 11 December 2022
For they are necessary to have above all else, especially money
Friday, 9 December 2022
There would be lines of barracks beneath the deanary gardens.
We wandered atop the walls: from here to Monk Bar, another medieval gatehouse, they follow the line of the Roman fortress's defences, angling round the [York] minster and affording lovely views of the soaring Norman architecture. Ottaway looked down longingly on the land he would never get to dig. There would be lines of barracks, he reckoned, beneath the deanary gardens. 'In my mind's eye I see it excavated,' he said. 'Not in my lifetime, but one day, when they build a nuclear power station here.'
C. Higgins, Under another sky (2013), 166
Thursday, 8 December 2022
Flattery calms all turbulence, emotional and atmospheric
One day, before taking off from San Francisco, flight attendants summoned Hyland [the pilot] from the cockpit to deal with a frightened passenger. It turned out to be John Steinbeck, who needed several drinks to quell his fear of flying. Hyland thought the author of The grapes of wrath was America's greatest living writer, and told him so. Flattery calms all turbulence, emotional and atmospheric. Whenever Steinbeck needed to fly cross-country, he phoned Hyland to learn his schedule, and planned his flights accordingly.
A. Beam, A great idea at the time: the rise, fall, and curious afterlife of the Great Books (2008), 144
Wednesday, 7 December 2022
But the Bible is an oriental book. Its alien imagery has nothing to do with us.
To my mind King James's Bible has been a very harmful influence on English prose. I am not so stupid as to deny its great beauty. It is majestical. But the Bible is an oriental book. Its alien imagery has nothing to do with us. Those hyperboles, those luscious metaphors, are foreign to our genius. I cannot but think that not the least of the misfortunes that the Secession from Rome brought upon the spiritual life of our country is that this work for so long a period became the daily, and with many the only, reading of our people. Those rhythms, that powerful vocabulary, that grandiloquence, became part and parcel of the national sensibility.
W.S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 34
Tuesday, 6 December 2022
He had crossed out in pencil all the passages in the Book of Common Prayer that praised God
It is strange that the devout should think God can be pleased when they slavishly pay them to him. When I was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask me to stay with him in the country. He was a religious man and he read prayers to the assembled household every morning. But he had crossed out in pencil all the passages in the Book of Common Prayer that praised God. He said that there was nothing so vulgar as to praise people to their faces and, himself a gentleman, he could not believe that God was so ungentlemanly as to like it. At the time it seemed to me a curious eccentricity. I think now that my friend showed very good sense.
W.S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 262
Monday, 5 December 2022
I have read a good many books on the art of fiction and all ascribe very small value to the plot
As a writer of fiction I go back, through innumerable generations, to the teller of tales round the fire in the cavern that sheltered neolithic men. I have had some sort of story to tell and it has interested me to tell it. To me it has been a sufficient object in itself. It has been my misfortune that for some time now a story has been despised by the intelligent. I have read a good many books on the art of fiction and all ascribe very small value to the plot. (In passing I should like to say that I cannot understand the sharp distinction some clever theorists make between story and plot. A plot is merely the pattern on which the story is arranged.) From these books you would judge that it is only a hindrance to the intelligent author and a concession that he makes to the stupid demands of the public.
W.S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 216
Sunday, 4 December 2022
The fact is that they [The English] are suspicious of form
W.S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 206
Saturday, 3 December 2022
As soon as I could afford it I bought a house in Mayfair
Friday, 2 December 2022
In France a man who has ruined himself for women is generally regarded with sympathy and admiration
W. S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 137
Thursday, 1 December 2022
Ibsen as we know had a meagre power of invention
W. S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 131