Quotes from Grant Allen

...a romantic attachment for chocolate-creams...

What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our boys' schooling interfere with their education!

They were savages, yet they were ghosts. The two most terrible and dreaded foes of civilised experience seemed combined at once in them.

I beg your pardon," Philip interposed stiffly, now put upon his mettle. "We have no taboos at all in England. ... England, you must remember, is a civilized country, and taboos are institutions that belong the lowest and most degraded savages.

In fact, in this modern England of ours, this fatherland of snobdom, one passes one's life in a see-saw of doubt, between the Scylla and Charybdis of those two antithetical social dangers: You are always afraid you may get to know somebody you yourself do not want to know, or may try to know somebody who does not want to know you.

Never let schooling interfere with education.

The big hall, badly lighted by a few contribution candles

It is almost impossible to get a novel printed in an English journal unless it is warranted to contain nothing at all to which anybody, however narrow, could possibly object, on any ground whatever, religious, political, social, moral or aesthetic. The romance that appeals to your average editor must say or hint at nothing at all which is not universally believed and received by everybody, everywhere in this realm of Britain.

Philip owned a looking-glass, and was therefore accustomed to a very high standard of manly beauty.

Now, nothing annoys an angry savage or an uneducated person so much as the perfect coolness of a civilized and cultivated man when he himself is boiling with indignation. He feels its superiority an affront to his barbarianism.

For the early English farmer, the world around was full of spiritual beings, half divine, half devilish.

A bullet would perhaps be an unnecessarily severe form of punishment to mete out; but I confess I could excuse the man who was so far carried away by his righteous indignation as to duck the fellow in the nearest horse-pond.

If there is an injustice or a barbarity possible, I might have been sure the law of England would make haste to perpetrate it.

Time passes so quickly. And if time passes quickly in time, how much more, then, in eternity!

if people begin by thinking rationally, the danger is that they may end by acting rationally also.

I belong to the tribe of the grasshopper, not that of the ant.

Tis life you should fear--life, with its dangers, its toils, its heartbreakings.

What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our boys schooling interfere with their education!