Cornflower Books

Good lines: the reactionary

     "In Wetherby's world, Victoria was still on the throne, a mass was still said in Latin and the horrors of contemporay syntax - contractions, split infinitives, hanging participles - held no dominion."

From The Blasphemer by Nigel Farndale.

Good lines: the happy few

     "There's nothing useless about reading the classics," said the Major, weighing the books in his hand. "I salute your continued efforts. Too few people today appreciate and pursue the delights of civilized culture for their own sake."

     "Yes, it can be a lonely pursuit," she said.

     "Then we - the happy few - must stick together," said the Major.

From Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson.

Good lines: understatement

    "... all I've got is the ability to turn a phrase until it catches the light."

Clive James.

You can hear him in Radio 4's Bookclub this afternoon.

Good lines: on being precipitate - or not

"She wore a 'terra-cotta' dress, And we stayed, because of the pelting storm, Within the hansom's dry recess, Though the horse had stopped; yea, motionless We sat on, snug and warm.

Then the downpour ceased, to my sharp, sad pain, And the glass that had screened our forms before Flew up and out she sprang to her door: I should have kissed her if the rain had lasted a minute more."

A Thunderstorm in Town by Thomas Hardy.

Good lines: written on a postcard

     "The pooled ponded rosed goldfished arboured lizarded swinghung towelled winetabled Aeronshrill garden leads into our own (dear God) olives and vines climbing to a mutes' conventicle, Niobe's eisteddfod, of cypresses."

Dylan Thomas writing to a friend from an Italian villa.

Quoted by Aeronwy Thomas in My Father's Places.

Good lines: mothers

     

    "There is a whole large class of society - called children - to whom mothers are not women, but inescapable appendages, sometimes dear, sometimes not, and never full human beings but supporting players in their own intense drama."

From The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies.

Good lines: first drafts

   

     " 'Play on, madam,' I said, remembering a line on which I had been working, feeling for the scansion in some recess of my memory. 'If love be the food of music,' I said, 'play on.' That didn't sound quite right. I resolved to work upon it."

From The Sonnets by Warwick Collins.

Good lines: the romantic novel

   

     "... with Jane Austen what we have is Mills & Boon written by a genius."

From Talking about Detective Fiction by P.D. James.

P.S. You may well wonder on what grounds the blessed Jane is cited in a book on detective fiction. All will be revealed..... or perhaps you'd like to guess?

Good lines: job description

 

     "My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don't know."

From The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Good lines: music

    

     "I think music is what language once aspired to be."

From Love begins in winter by Simon Van Booy.

Good lines: living with books

   

    "In my view, there should be books in every room of the house, with the possible exception of the larder. Books in the attic waiting to be re-read; in the garage, waiting to be re-cycled at the jumble sale; and of course, in piles in the box room. These are just in store, awaiting their moment. All other rooms also need their quota, ready to be pulled from the shelf or the coffee table for a desultory browse. You never know when you might need a quick fix - for books are as addictive as any class A drug. Those lucky enough to have the habit cannot go without reading matter for even a day.

     " To me a room without books is missing an essential feature, as important as lights, chairs or carpets. Or pictures: in their way, books are like pictures on the wall; they reveal whether you are a minimalist with all covers hidden under plain wrappers, a maximalist whose every room has a generously filled bookcase, or an anarchist whose preferred method of storage is an untidy heap."

From Books do furnish a room by Leslie Geddes-Brown.

Good lines: the agricultural show

  

     "The man on the loudspeaker said please no worms in the Pet Class. Last year someone dug up and entered 3."

Deborah Devonshire to Diana Mosley.

From The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters edited by Charlotte Mosley.

Good lines: on being read to

  

     "[Mum] read to us most days, and occasionally all day - from breakfast to dinner, stopping only for cups of rooibos tea, to tell Ruth what part of the house to clean, and for lunch, munched between paragraphs. The books were always books that also interested her: Joan Aiken, C.S. Lewis, Ursula K. Le Guin, Peter Dickenson, Lucy Boston, Rudyard Kipling, J.R.R. Tolkien. Books with vast, rich stories that swallowed you into their worlds. Books that left you, when the last page had been turned and the dust, flies, and mind-numbing heat resurfaced in your consciousness, pining for the characters like left-behind friends."

From Twenty Chickens for a Saddle by Robyn Scott.

Good lines: books

  

     "I have got to page 652 in C* & there are only 741, what shall I do when it's finished, I really never will read any more beastly books, they are only an extra complication to one's pathetic life."

     "What can I read? I sit here with a vacant stare and no book."

Letters from Deborah Devonshire to Nancy Mitford, May and June 1944.

From The Mitfords - Letters Between Six Sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosley.

*"Maurice Baring, C (1924). A popular saga of Edwardian Society."

Good lines: hermits

Lady Croom: ...What hermits do you have?

Noakes: I have no hermits, my lady.

Lady Croom: Not one? I am speechless.

Noakes: I am sure a hermit could be found. One could advertise.

Lady Croom: Advertise?

Noakes: In the newsapers.

Lady Croom: But surely a hermit who takes a newspaper is not a hermit in whom one can have complete confidence.

From Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. (This excerpt follows on from the second of these passages).

Good lines: the vicar

   

    "A tall, bony man with a mass of snowy curls, he had the habit of fixing his parishioners with an amber stare before offering them the glory of his profile.

    His rooms bore witness to a well-ordered mind ...The shelves of his library were lined with sets of the classics. He knew the whole of Homer by heart: each morning, between a cold bath and breakfast, he would compose a few hexameters of his own...

    To the villagers their vicar was a mystery. Most of the women were in love with him - or transported by the timbre of his voice. But he was far too busy to attend to their spiritual needs, and his actions often outraged them.

     One Sunday, before Holy Communion, some women in flowery hats were approaching the church door, their features reverently composed to receive the Sacrament. Suddenly, a window of the vicarage banged open; the vicar's voice bawled out, 'Mind your heads!' and he fired off a couple of barrels at the wood-pigeons crooning in the elms."

From On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin. 

Good lines: writing places

  

     "It looked heavenly: a place to explore, to run around, where we would be living forever. It had verandas and balconies, water-butts, stepped gardens, a large boat shed in the back yard, the harbour and a wall protecting us from the wilds of the friendly estuary beyond. We had fallen upon paradise. As we were settling in, my father wrote to Margaret Taylor, who had arranged for the place, that, 'this is it: the place, the house, the workroom, the time' and that he could never thank her enough. 'I shall write in this water and tree room on the cliff, every word, will be my thanks to you ...' "

From My Father's Places by Aeronwy Thomas.

Good lines: digression

 

      "Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;- they are the life, the soul of reading;--- take them out of this book, for instance,-- you might as well take the book along with them; - one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer;--- he steps forth like a bridegroom, - bids All hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail."

From The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne.

Good lines: words

     "She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water."

From The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.

Good lines: tryst

   

     "Sometimes when she is able to spend the night with him they are wakened by the three minarets of the city beginning their prayers before dawn. He walks with her through the indigo markets that lie between South Cairo and her home. The beautiful songs of faith enter the air like arrows, one minaret answering another, as if passing on a rumour of the two of them as they walk through the cold morning air, the smell of charcoal and hemp already making the air profound. Sinners in a holy city."

From The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.