Quotes from Richard Hughes

Middle age snuffs out more talent than ever wars or sudden deaths do.

Do your bit to save humanity from lapsing back into barbarity by reading all the novels you can.

Mathias shrugged. After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances.

A method involving apparent obscurity is surely justified when it is the clearest, the simplest, the only method possible of saying in full what the writer has to say

Since landscape changes like this from country to country it must owe very little to Nature: Nature is no more than the canvas, and landscape the self-portrait the people who live there paint on it. But no, hold hard! Surely, rather the people who have lived there; for landscape is always at least one generation behind in its portrayal.

Once he got bitten, and they all wept bitterly, expecting to see a spectacular death-agony; but he just went off into the bush and probably ate something, for he came back in a few days quite cock-a-hoop and as ready to eat snakes as ever.

The punctilious magistrate, presiding in his bivouac of matting, vanished without punctilio.

You can never count on them. They say what they think you want them to say, and then they say what the opposing council wants them to say, too, if they like his face.

Life seemed suddenly a little empty, for never again could there happen to her something so dangerous, so sublime.

And then an event did occur, to Emily, of considerable importance. She suddenly realized who she was.ï¾  There is little reason that one can see why it should not have happened to her five years earlier, or even five later; and none, why it should have come that particular afternoon.ï¾ 

Emily and Rachel had their hair cut short, and were allowed to do everything the boys did - to climb trees, swim, and trap animals and birds: they even had two pockets in their frocks.

Contact with a small baby can conjure at least an echo of that feeling in those who are not obscured by an uprush of maternity to the brain. Of course it is not really so cut-and-dried as all this; but often the only way of attempting to express the truth is to build it up, like a card-house, of a pack of lies.

Emily was still so saturated in earthquake as to be dumb. She ate earthquake and slept earthquake: her fingers and legs were earthquake. With John it was ponies. The earthquake had been fun: but it was the ponies that mattered.

Bushes were lying flat, laid back on the ground as close as a rabbit lays back his ears.

Being shot at is so unlike what one expects it to be that one can hardly connect the two ideas enough to have the appropriate emotions, the first few times.

The children did not answer. It shocked them deeply to have to see a grown-up, a should-be Olympian, displaying his feelings. In exact opposition to the witnesses at the Transfiguration, they felt it would have been good for them to be almost anywhere rather than there.

she never knew when she might offend this inner harpy, Conscience, unwittingly: and lived in terror of those brazen claws, should she ever let it be hatched from the egg.

A criminal court is a very curious place. The seat of a ritual quite as elaborate as any religious one, it lacks in itself any impressiveness or symbolism of architecture. A robed judge in court looks like a catholic bishop would if he were to celebrate mass in some municipal bath-house. There is nothing to make one aware that here the Real Presence is: the presence of death.

but the cracks and scars on Jonsen's enormous hands were as interesting to her as the valleys on the moon to a boy with a telescope.

For in public life you aren't free to act on your inclinations or even your principles: in order to acquire power you have to forfeit free-will, which seems rather paradoxical. And how much more so must it be in a dictatorship! A man like Lenin must have about as much choice and freedom of action as the topmost acrobat in a human pyramid

I would rather have to extract information from the devil himself than from a child.

Augustine's own head was getting a little dizzy. All this—it was straight from the horse's mouth indubitably, but it sounded so unreal! The sort of thing which happened to people in "history," not people today, not real people. Anyway it was surely over now ... well—if only those crazy vindictive Frenchmen in the Ruhr

It is a fact that it takes experience before one can realize what is a catastrophe and what is not. Children have little faculty of distinguishing between disaster and the ordinary course of their lives.

It would have surprised Mrs. Thornton very much to have been told that hitherto she had meant practically nothing to her children. She took a keen interest in Psychology (the Art Babblative, Southey calls it). She was full of theories about their upbringing which she had not time to put into effect; but nevertheless she thought she had a deep understanding of their temperaments and was the center of their passionate devotion.