Edmund Crispin Quotes
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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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A nomadic chicken was pacing across the street.
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At the north-eastern angle is the chapel, an uncommonly hideous relic of late Victorian times.
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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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The afternoon wore away.
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The square panes of the small windows were grimy and misanthropic.
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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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A Johnsonian portentousness emanated from him.
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His reverie merged discouragingly into the austere reality of the classroom.
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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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As the popularity of science-fiction increases, so inevitably does the volume of clownish imprecation against it.
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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 artistic temperament is too often only an alibi for lack of responsibility....
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The parents are of the expensive, cocktail-party-and-chromium kind.
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Their squalor, being indescribable, will not be described.
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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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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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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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The masters, robed, gowned, their attitudes varying from indulgent ennui to virtual coma.
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I believe that many of the boys have a lurking fear that their parents will disgrace them in some fashion.
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Meaningless piety, she knew – but to be always meaningful makes a cold world.