Quotes from Nevil Shute

You mean, business is slowing down?" She nodded. "Lots of my friends are out of a job now. People aren't working like they used to, and they don't want secretaries

it was incredible that this thing should be happening to him. It was what he had read of and had found some difficulty in crediting. It was what they were supposed to do to Jews in concentration camps. It could not be true.

Some folks just have to have the liquor, times like these." He eyed a policeman on the corner. "That's what the cops here seem to think, in this city, at any rate. I've never seen a drunk arrested yet, not just for being drunk.

He could not elucidate it any further for her, and they drove on to the big hardware store. It had only a few customers, and very few assistants. They left the baby in the car and went through to the gardening department, and searched some time for an assistant

He is a good man, and will climb up to the Six Blissful Seats. He has known sin and trouble and it has not made him bitter; he has known sorrow and it has not made him sad. In these last months that have been granted to him he is trying to do good, not

Jerry stood the old man to a glass of mild, and asked, "What do you think of all these Americans in Trenarth, Mr Parsons?" The ancient piped in his old quavering voice, "I like them very well; oh, very well indeed. We get on nicely with them here. I don't like these white ones that are coming in now, though. I hope they don't send us no more o' them." It was too good not to be repeated; it ran round both whites and blacks that afternoon.

He was just entering the club ahead of me, a tall and rather emaciated man of about seventy, a little unsteady on his feet. He tripped over the doormat as he went in and stumbled forward; the hall porter jumped out and caught him by the elbow.

research projects at Trenton. He had sat for the Canadian

Leave-takings are stupid things, and best forgotten about as quickly as possible.

I would divide the senior executives of the engineering world into two categories, the starters and the runners, the men with a creative instinct who can start a new venture and the men who can run it to make it show a profit.... I was a starter and useless as a runner.

He sank into an apathy of heat and dust and sweat, and joined the morose ten per cent of men in South Fast Asia Command whose wives had let them down.

It was incongruous at Coombargana. In a great city such things happen now and then, where people are too strained and hurried to pay much attention to the griefs of others, but in a small rural community like ours, led by wise and tolerant people such as my father and mother, staffed by good types culled and weeded out over the years, such secret, catastrophic griefs do not occur. Troubles at Coombargana had always been small troubles in my lifetime.

Professor O'Leary was Professor of Mediaeval Literature at Ann Arbor University in Michigan, just outside Detroit.

Cyrus Shawn O'Leary got that letter on the Friday morning at his home in Ann Arbor near Detroit.

You felt to look at him that he would be wonderful upon a horse. I

after all that I had read during the night. Even into this quiet place the war had reached like the tentacle of an octopus and had touched this girl and brought about her death. Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after it's all over.

Mr Parkinson told him what was his due. "On your salary scale, the firm gives three months' sick leave on full pay. Then if you are still unfit for work, another three months on half pay.

He was one of that great class of Englishmen who love their wives and trust them unquestioningly with their money and their honour, but are apt to hedge a little over their motor-cars.

All those cities, all those fields and farms, with nobody, and nothing left alive. Just nothing there. I simply can't take it in.

Her ideas about reporters had been moulded by the cinema; it was a surprise to her to find that in real life they could be kind and helpful people with good manners.

She had known for some time that his wife and family were very real to him, more real by far than the half-life in a far corner of the world that had been forced upon him since the war.

You don't feel any different as you get older. Only, you can't do so much.

And then, Monsieur votre fils, he was well too? Well, they had to know. He turned away from her blindly. 'Madame,' he said, 'mon fils est mort. Il est tombé de son avion, au-dessus de Heligoland Bight.

I think dogs need our prayers more than people. We know that God looks after people when they die and that Daddy and Mummy and Bill are all right, but we don't know that about dogs.