Quotes from Francis Brett Young

An autumn garden has a sadness when the sun is not shining...

The longer one lives, the more mysterious life seems.

All primitive people are frightened of owls,' said Harley. 'The villagers here are scared to death of the gufo. Birds of ill omen. If they see one, they think they'll die. But they never do. See one, I mean, of course,' he added with a laugh.

Through all that period my mind was absorbed, excited and entranced by a series of visions that remain with me to this day. Gibraltar, grey and monstrous against the dawn; the snows of Crete, flamingo-hued in the fire of sunset; Port Said, where first the smell of the East begins; pink mountains of Sinai in their lunar desolation; Colombo, sweltering under a vertical sun.

I think of him, in those days, as a remote figure — a square-shouldered silhouette posed motionless on the bridge against a background of burning blue sky.

The desert's illimitable freedom," the officer murmured, as he poured out Simon's whiskey. "It's not altogether her fault, Mr. Jackson. It's these damned novelists. Every novel written about the desert should be censored by the police.

It was true that the unexpectedness of the summons had rather taken his breath away. It had come as a laconic cable: Come Naples next boat if you want to marry. Cable reply. Agatha - which made him rub his eyes. But Simeon Jackson was a man of action, and his deep-rooted belief in the romantic waywardness of women had suggested to him that his little girl had been taught by the backwardness of Europe to realize the rock-bottom solidity of the American business man [...}

In the street of the perfume-sellers Miss Jenkins subsided on a settee like a fat bee drunk with essences, [...}

her mind was full not of facts, but of glamour;

Fortunately, also, that very night the wolfish English summer discarded its lamb-skins.

He prayed to goodness that the relationship might be reasonably remote. He remembered, anxiously, that a man may not marry his grandmother...

It didn't occur to him to make allowances for the long English twilight. That twilight gave to the landscape a curious effect of suspended life. It cast upon everything (or was that, perhaps, the beer?) an eerie, magical bloom. Every mile that he went - and now he was hurrying - he felt surer and surer that he was on the verge of some shattering experience.

Gradually a change came over Willoughby. It showed itself first in a distinct gain of strength that overjoyed her. All his life, in the sodden midlands and in the clearer cold of Central Europe, Willoughby's body had simply struggled for existence; whatever vitality he possessed had been poured out daily to nourish the pale, exotic flower of his music. In this blander climate, like a starved plant that rejoices in a genial soil, the musician became a man.

But Catherine — or rather the Catherine of happy memory — had so much more. Even in her present invalid state, she enforced her hard, brilliant personality with a definiteness that reduced little Daphne to the pallor of a still-life pastel beside a strongly-coloured portrait in oils.

How precarious that safety was, he didn't realize. It was shattered, at last, by means of a trifling accident. Christmas had passed. By this time the sudden splendours of spring had waned. Now Meerlust lay like an island of heavier green in a tawny sea of veld that swept upward wave beyond wave to the arching sky. The rivers ran down to the sea in a gin-clear trickle. The scattered rocks of the wilderness radiated fierce heat.

The night was still, of a milk-warm loveliness. Moonlight sprayed silver on the shining camphor- leaves; late orange-blossom swathed the cottage in a perfume so dense that it could almost be felt. The spirit of Meerlust had never been more subtly intoxicating.

It was past midnight when the doctor from Stellenbosch drove splashing through the drift. Warned by the beam of his car's headlights, which dredged up, as it were, the white ghost of the house from depths of a dense, hot darkness, Hans Malan stalked out on to the stoep to meet him.

The police," he said. "You can't carry firearms in England without a licence. Just like dogs. You'll be getting into trouble before you know where you are. Now look here, ma'am," he went on, with increasing confidence, "you'd far better make a clean breast of it." "A clean breast? What do you mean? Why do you pester me like this?" she cried, with sudden terror.

My wife will look after you, madam," he said. "I hope you'll be comfortable. Sleep well — pleasant dreams!" he added, with daring familiarity; then climbed the stairs slowly, feeling more like a slapped child than the hero of romance which he had imagined himself an hour before.

Well, war, as I've told her a hundred times, makes strange bedfellows.

No doubt they were genuine Russian refugees. North Africa, from Cairo to Tangiers, was full of them. And these were like the rest; thin, indolent, with high cheek- bones, wide, supercilious mouths, and lank, ashen hair. Their manner cut them off from the rest of the people in the cafe as definitely as though they belonged to a distant and superior planet.

They thought I was mad, and Russians are always sympathetic with mad men.

You are an educated man, sir," he said. "Possibly you have read Turgenev? He wrote a novel. Fumée. Smoke. That was his best title. Everything in Russia ends in smoke — like my poor manuscripts." The waiter placed our cognac on the table; I handed my friend his glass. "Everything in Russia," he repeated. "In smoke, like my poor manuscripts, or in liquor, like myself.

His speech . . . well, she couldn't be quite so sure of that. It certainly wasn't the kind of speech to which she was accustomed} the vowels were either slightly foreign or slightly cockney. It was better, on the whole, to decide that they were foreign.