Quotes from Geoffrey Household

I have noticed that what cats most appreciate in a human being is not the ability to produce food - which they take for granted - but his or her entertainment value. Asmodeus took to his toy enthusiastically. In another week he permitted me to stroke him, producing a raucous purr, but, in order to save his face, pretending to be asleep.

He who has learned not to intrude his emotions upon his fellows has also learned not to intrude them upon himself.

I have never taken sides, never leaped wholeheartedly into one scale or the other; nor do I realize disappointments, provided they are severe, until the occasion is long past. Yet I am ruled by my emotions, though I murder them at birth.

A well-trained diplomat is supposed to write French, for example, like an angel, but to speak it with the peculiar gutlessness of a Geneva nancy-boy.

When I heard that she was dead, I really suffered very little.

I distrust patriotism; the reasonable man can find little in these days that is worth dying for. But dying against - there's enough iniquity in Europe to carry the most urbane or decadent into battle.

We are so dependent on luck, good and bad. I think of those men and women—cases faintly parallel to mine—who live in one room and eat poorly and lie in bed, since their incomes are too small for any marked activity. Their lives would be unbearable were it not for their hopes of good luck and fears of bad. They have, in fact, little of either; but illusion magnifies what there is.

Love's only business is to preserve the race, not the individual.

None of my mental activities for the past twenty-four hours might be called thinking. I had allowed my body to take charge. It knew far more about escaping and healing than I did.

The only periods, I suspect, when a man feels captain of his soul are those when he has not the slightest need of such an organ.

Her skin was not a surface; it was an indefinite glory of the palest rose and orange that chose to mould itself to those tense limbs.

I have always been sure that if England were ever occupied its people would find the organization of underground cells an almost effortless means of self-expression.

One does not, I think, kill oneself without a definite desire to do so. It is hardly ever an act to which a man must key himself up; it is a temptation which he must struggle against.

Time drags only when one is thinking fast.

I like to see a billy-goat accompanying the dairy herd to pasture, supposedly to bring them luck or to eat the herbs that cause abortion.

My arrival was noticed only by a boy and girl, the inevitable boy and girl to be found in every dark corner of a great city. Better provision should be made for them—a Park of Temporary Affection, for example, from which lecherous clergymen and aged civil servants should be rigorously excluded.

Taken aback by the discovery, a little too late, that tropical rain has the volume of a bathroom shower, I splashed on to a train for Panama City, put up at the Hotel Europa and restored equanimity with Planter's Punch. A world in which so delectable a drink existed, as well as the thirst necessary to deal with two successive pints of it, could not be wholly bad. In the evening I set out to inspect North American civilisation.

Yet I am ruled by my emotions, though I murder them at birth.

I have noticed that what cats most appreciate in a human being is not the ability to produce food—which they take for granted—but his or her entertainment value.

If a man is clean shaved and has a well-fitting collar and tie - even reasonably dirty - he can get away with a multitude of suspicious circumstances

The poets are wrong when they describe the grave as cold.