Quotes from John Buchan

gave half-a-crown to a beggar because I saw him yawn; he was a fellow-sufferer.

Most people are a little scared at new things ... You want a bigger heart to face danger which you go out to look for, and which doesn't come to you in the ordinary way of business. Still, that's pretty much the same thing—good nerves and good health, and a natural liking for rows.

He said that the great offensives of the future would be psychological, and he thought the Governments should get busy about it and prepare their defence... He considered that the most deadly weapon in the world was the power of mass-persuasion.

We are all, even the best of us, egotists and self-deceivers, and without a little comfortable make-believe to clothe us we should freeze in the outer winds.

Light-hearted or light-headed, I know not which I was, but I know that I had no fear.

MORS JANUA VITAE

We've exalted our womenfolk into little tin gods, and at the same time left them out of the real business of life.

Lossberg's coat-tails.

Buchan was brought up in Kirkcaldy, Fife, and enjoyed many summer holidays with his grandparents in Broughton, in the Scottish Borders, where he developed a fascination of Scottish history and tales of old heroes, much like how his great idol Sir Walter Scott had done a century before. The young Buchan also developed a love of the local scenery and wildlife, which often feature in detail throughout his novels.

Some also have wished that the next way to their Father's house were here, that they might be troubled no more with either hills or mountains to go over, but the Way is the Way, and there is an end.

Then I knew that the prophecy had been true, and that their prophet had not failed them. The long-looked for revelation had come. Greenmantle had appeared at last to an awaiting people.

But I thought you were dead,' I put in. 'Mors janua vitae,' he smiled.

Romance once more, thinks Dickson . That which has graced the slim throats of princesses in far-away Courts now adorns an elderly matron in a semi-detached villa; the jewels of the wild Nausicaa have fallen to the housewife Penelope. Mrs. McCunn preens herself before the glass. "I call it very genteel," she says. "Real stylish. It might be worn by a queen." "I wouldn't say but it has," says Dickson.

But let none, he added, pray to have the full music; for it will make him who hears it a footsore traveller in

I have been told that, when you can adequately formulate a grief, you have removed half the sting of it, and I fancy that in the case of the pleasing emotions the same explication doubles the pleasure. That is the virtue of the poets, since they do for the ordinary man what he cannot do for himself.

had a private account to settle with my conscience. I had funked the place in the foggy twilight, and it does not do to let a matter like that slide. A man's courage is like a horse that refuses a fence; you have got to take him by the head and cram him at it again. If you don't, he will funk worse next time. I hadn't enough courage to be able to take chances with it, though I was afraid of many things, the thing I feared most mortally was being afraid.

It's a wise conspirator that knows his own name.

It is a melancholy fact which exponents of democracy must face that, while all men may be on a level in the eyes of the State, they will continue in fact to be preposterously unequal.

You will never hear a bird cry or a sheep bleat or a weasel scream.

For I was only a young lad, and my life had been bleak and barren. Small wonder that the call of youth set every fibre of me a-quiver.

I loathed having to screw myself up to emergencies late in the day. Such things should take place in the early morning. It was like going over the top in France; I didn't mind it so much when it happened during a drizzling dawn, when one was anyhow depressed and only half-awake, but I abominated an attack in the cold-blooded daylight, or in the dusk when one wanted to relax.

It is the place and time for dark deeds, for the heart grows savage; and if two enemies met in the hollow of the mist only one would go away.

I see now that the wind must have veered to the south-east, and that my plan was leading me into the fastnesses of the hills; but I would have wandered for weeks sooner than disobey the word of the girl who sang in the rain.

It was pretty clear that he was mad, for madness means just this dislocation of the modes of thought which mortals have agreed upon as necessary to keep the world together.