Quotes from Dick Francis

I doubt if there is such a thing as a wholly free choice, because one's choices are rooted in one's personality.

I smiled into the clever eyes. "Find out for me," I said, "whether Oliver

The house was dark. Upstairs, behind the black open window with the pale curtain flapping in the spartan air, slept Arthur Morrison, trainer of the forty-three racehorses in the stables below. Morrison habitually slept lightly. His ears were sharper than half a dozen guard dogs', his stable-hands said.

I inherited my brother's life. Inherited his desk, his business, his gadgets, his enemies, his horses and his mistress. I inherited my brother's life, and it nearly killed me.

I stood on the outside of disaster, looking in.

It's difficult to say just where a marriage goes wrong, because the accepted reason often isn't the real one.

A bully to the weak but a bootlicker to the strong.

The only thing better than getting away with doing a crime was to get someone else convicted for having done it.

unexpected regret. Watched him until the consciousness went out of his eyes, and they were simply open but seeing nothing.

It isn't necessary to speculate about the driving force within us, it leaps out and reveals itself. Under pressure, it can't be hidden

Gawd, he thought furiously, he hadn't expected it to be like this. Just a lousy walk down the yard to give a carrot to the gangly chestnut. Guilt and fear and treachery. They bypassed his sneering mind and erupted through his nerves instead.

You always take sunshine with you. I don't suppose you know it, but everything brightens when people like you walk in

ones. I could see that I would be inevitably eased out, and not by doubt but by concern.

Impulses like that, I answered myself, that seemed to come from nowhere, they weren't really impulses at all, they were decisions already made but waiting for an opportunity to be spoken aloud.

The Victorians who had built the place had not intended importunate men friends to batter down the girls' doors. They were a solid job. But in the view of the thin woman's calm assumption that breaking in was within my powers, I didn't care to fail. I broke the lock with my heel, in the end. The wood gave way on the jamb inside the room, and the door opened with a crash.

When I had finished dressing, I took another look in the same long mirror. There was the man who had come from Australia four months ago, a man in a good dark-gray suit, a white shirt, and a navy-blue silk tie; there was his shell, anyway. Inside I wasn't the same man, nor ever would be again.

I do a job which I ought to find satisfying, and it leaves me bored and empty. A diet of milk and honey, when you have teeth, he observed.

How not to sound like a upper class man. It had been mostly a matter, I'd found, of speaking not far back in the throat but up behind the teeth, a reversal of the way I'd just painstakingly learned to speak French like a Frenchman

If you mix a liquid with gunpowder and ignite it, and it burns with a steady blue flame, then the liquid must be at least fifty percent alcohol, and that's PROOF. That's the way they proved a liquid was alcohol in the 17th century when distilled spirits were first taxed, and that's what is meant by proof to this day

I did not do anything. They had a go at me for being who I am That doesn't make sense Conrad said, People don't get attacked just for being who they are Tell that to the Jews Dart said

On the day I left, when I gave her a gold bracelet, she kissed me and told me not to come back, as things were never as good the second time. She was God's gift to bachelors, that girl.

her to me and asked if I

him betting. Taff and the others could hardly be persuaded not to accept such easy pickings, which left the source of the cash, Harry Gilbert himself. Precisely what, I wondered