Edmund Crispin Quotes
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At the north-eastern angle is the chapel, an uncommonly hideous relic of late Victorian times.
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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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A nomadic chicken was pacing across the street.
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A science fiction story is one which presupposes a technology, or an effect of technology, or a disturbance in the natural order, such as humanity, up to the time of writing, has not in actual fact, experienced.
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A Johnsonian portentousness emanated from him.
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And the parents, of course, are aware of this. The fathers come here anxious to look intelligent, amiable and prosperous; the mothers put on their best frocks and hope that their sons’ friends will think them young-looking, attractive, well turned out .
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What's more, I don't believe any policeman uses words like "antonym". I don't believe you're a policeman at all.
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And everywhere there were parents – parents mouse-like, parents aggressive, parents ostentatious, parents modest, parents subdued, parents animated: a growing rout lured together under the radiant porcelain sky – and for what? the headmaster wondered. It was improbable that they enjoyed themselves. It was improbable, even, that their offspring enjoyed themselves. And yet there was a glamour about it all which stirred the blood, and the headmaster himself, as he contemplated the spectacle, was not immune.
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The square panes of the small windows were grimy and misanthropic.
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As the popularity of science-fiction increases, so inevitably does the volume of clownish imprecation against it.
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His reverie merged discouragingly into the austere reality of the classroom.
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To its left stood a transistor radio, which was emitting and indeed had been emitting for some considerable time, a symphonic movement of vaguely romantic cast; from the movement’s excessive length, vacuity and derivativeness, Fen judged it to be by Mahler.
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Boys wandered about in a condition of unnatural civility.
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Simblefield, whose ability to camouflage his ignorance was held in well-justified contempt by the rest of the form.
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The parents are of the expensive, cocktail-party-and-chromium kind.
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None but the most blindly credulous will imagine the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns of England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits.
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At this rate, he felt, he might even live to see the day when novelists described their characters by some other device than that of manoeuvring them into examining themselves in mirrors.
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The artistic temperament is too often only an alibi for lack of responsibility....
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Heavens, how I detest change! I sometimes think that change, and change alone, is the source of all misery. No doubt Eden was quite static and lethargic.
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Their squalor, being indescribable, will not be described.
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The masters, robed, gowned, their attitudes varying from indulgent ennui to virtual coma.
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Meaningless piety, she knew – but to be always meaningful makes a cold world.
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None but the most blindly credulous will imaging the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns of England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits.
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I believe that many of the boys have a lurking fear that their parents will disgrace them in some fashion.