Edmund Crispin Quotes
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Wife punctured this feeble artifice without effort, and carried him off incontinently to whatever of marital purgatory she had hoarded up for him.
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At breakfast-time, however, destiny's preparations were still not quite complete.
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I find it worth while to help clean up the mess made by malevolence and folly. But I do try not to like the mess for its own sake.
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Women, who on grounds of modesty alone might be expected to prefer being killed or cured by one of their own sex, prove as incalculable in this as in most other things;
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I’m inclined to think,’ said Fen, ‘that neither opposing nor advocating change makes much difference to the sum total of human misery. History suggests that it stays constant in quantity, if not in kind. Science rids us of plague but endows us with the atom bomb. Humanitarianism rids us of sweated labour but offers us the horrors of political agitation in its place. There’s a choice of evils, but that’s all.
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Some twenty boys sat behind wilfully collapsible desks, occupying their brief intermission in various more or less destructive and useless ways.
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He was a tall, burly, youngish man in plain clothes whose features some freak of heredity had assembled into a perpetual expression of muted alarm, so that to be in his company was like consorting with a man dogged by assassins.
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Boys were emerging in increasing numbers to greet, guide and control their apprehensive kin.
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The task of instilling Wordsworthian metaphysics into the barren intellects of the Modern Lower Fifth.
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Where there are cottages, there will be tots also, squatting pensively in the dust or moving unsteadily about, absorbed in the tremendous adventure of proceeding unaided from one point to the next.
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Do not allow yourselves to be cajoled into supposing that political apathy is dangerous. Dictators such as Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin are raised to power, not by apathy, but by mass fanaticism.
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Soames, for example, who suddenly broke away after twenty years’ teaching and went off to be jokes editor to a firm of matchbox manufacturers.
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He was a small, stringy man of about fifty, with immense horn-rimmed spectacles, a long, sharp nose, and an unusual capacity for garrulous incoherence.
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Miss Parry was gazing at this scene, in an attempt to dispel the mental indigestion occasioned by reading thirty consecutive essays on the pontificate of Leo X.
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None of us has the right to assess the value of a human existence. All must be held valuable, or none. The death of Christ and the death of Socrates," Fen added dryly, "suggest that our judgements are scarcely infallible...And the evil of Nazism lay precisely in this, that a group of men began to differentiate between the value of their fellow-beings, and to act on their conclusions. It isn't a habit which I, for one, would like to encourage.
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Intellect stood aside and informed him of this fact.
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THE majority of us are permitted to cope with the important events of our lives in a decently leisurely manner – with ample breathing-space, that is to say, in which to assimilate one shock and recuperate before the next.
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Scotland Yard isn't called in nearly as often as detective novelists seem to think.
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He dredged in a pocket, producing from it a box of non-ethical, and indeed totally inefficacious, tranquillizers, such as could be bought without a prescription across the counter of any chemist’s. ‘Here, have a Kwye Tewd.’
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The afternoon wore away.
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The main teaching block – a large but comfortless eighteenth-century erection of red brick, ivy-covered and a kind of game reservation for mice.
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What he said was, they're finding so many new groups and sub-groups that in ten or twenty years you'll be able to identify a chap straight away just by his blood, like as if it was his fingerprints.
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Down the Woodstock Road towards them an elderly, abnormally thin man was pedalling, his thin white hair streaming in the wind and sheer desperation in his eyes. Immediately behind him, running for their lives, came Scylla and Charybdis; behind them, a milling, shouting rout of undergraduates, with Mr Adrian Barnaby (on a bicycle) well in the van; behind them, the junior proctor, the University Marshal, and two bullers, packed into a small Austin car and looking very elect, severe and ineffectual; and last of all, faint but pursuing, lumbered the ungainly form of Mr Hoskins.
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Mr Philpotts was a chemistry master whose principal characteristic lay in a sort of unfocused vehemence.