M.M. Kaye Quotes

For though she was ordinary, she possessed health, wit, courage, charm, and cheerfulness. But because she was not beautiful, no one ever seemed to notice these other qualities, which is so often the way of the world.

I cannot see anything admirable in stupidity, injustice and sheer incompetence in high places, and there is too much of all three in the present administration.

In the absence of any concrete evidence. I plump for Leonard Stock as the murderer. First, because he's the most unlikely person, and as anyone who has ever read a murder story knows, it's always the most unlikely person who turns out to have done the deed--and fifty thousand authors can't be wrong.

I do not doubt that you would have done all that was in your power to make her happy. But it is not in your power to build a new world; or to turn back time

Common sense will nearly always stand you in better stead than a slavish adherence to the conventions.

It is not an easy thing to be a woman and love with the whole heart: which men do not understand
having many loves, and delighting in danger and war.

people everywhere are suspicious of strangers and hostile towards anyone different from themselves

I still subscribe to the minority view that all horses are offensive weapons and not to be trusted a yard.

Perhaps I myself am a pompous and conceited old fool. And perhaps if these fools I complain of were French or Dutch or German I would not mind so much, because then I could say 'What else can you expect?' and feel superior. It is because they are men of my own race that I would have them all good.

They were a fanatically independent people, much addicted to intrigue, treachery and murder, and that among their other national traits was an intolerance of rulers (or, if it came to that, of any form of authority whatsoever, other than their own desires).

He means, Coppy, that even though he had no intention of getting engaged or married, or otherwise entangled, he has discovered--probably with disgust--that the light of Reason has been put out and that he has been forced, against every prompting of intelligence, common sense and will-power, to chuck himself and his future at your feet, because he knows that unless you can be persuaded to pick them up, neither the one or the other will ever be of any value to him again.

There is no particular merit in fighting for your own skin when you know that it is fight or die, but there is considerable merit in being prepared to die when you know you can escape quite easily. Put at its lowest, there is a certain stubborn foolhardy heroism in that.

Lavender's blue,
Rosemary's green,
When you are king,
I shall be queen

Nor have I become so blind that I cannot see what is written on your face, or so deaf that I cannot hear what is in your voice; and I am not yet so old that I cannot remember my own youth

This story was written many moons ago under an apple tree in an orchard in Kent, which is one of England's prettiest counties . . . I had read at least twenty of the [fairy tales] when I noticed something that had never struck me before--I suppose because I had always taken it for granted. All the princesses, apart from such rare exceptions as Snow White, were blond, blue-eyed, and beautiful, with lovely figures and complexions and extravagantly long hair. This struck me as most unfair, and suddenly I began to wonder just how many handsome young princes would have asked a king for the hand of his daughter if that daughter had happened to be gawky, snub-nosed, and freckled, with shortish mouse-colored hair? None, I suspected. They would all have been of chasing after some lissome Royal Highness with large blue eyes and yards of golden hair and probably nothing whatever between her ears! It was in that moment that a story about a princess who turned out to be ordinary jumped into my mind, and the very next morning I took my pencil box and a large rough-notebook down to the orchard and, having settled myself under an apple tree in full bloom, began to write . . . the day was warm and windless and without a cloud in the sky. A perfect day and a perfect place to write a fairy story.

Have you really become so much an Angrezi that you believe your people have only to say "It is forbidden", for such old customs as this to cease immediately? Bah!

Within that ageing outer shell we remain very much the same as we did in our late teens and early twenties.