Nevil Shute Quotes

Into the world of romance, of make-belief and double brandies!

You cannot argue stupidity, you just have to accept it patiently as one of those things.

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.

I still think Connie was a human man, a very, very good one - but a man. I have been wrong in my judgments many times before; if now I am ignorant and blind, I'm sorry, but it's no new thing. If that should be the case though, it means that I have had great privileges in my life, perhaps more so than any man alive today. Because it means that on the fields and farms of England, on the airstrips of the desert and the jungle, in the hangars of the Persian Gulf and on the tarmacs of the southern islands, I have walked and talked with God.

You can only do a thing for the first time once, and that goes for falling in love.

Round the next corner and in the next street Adventure lies in wait for you. Oh, who can tell what you may meet Round the next corner and in the next street! Could life be anything but sweet When all is hazardous and new? Round the next corner and in the next street Adventure lies in wait for you. That

We are not like that, we engineers. We are men of understanding and of education, on whom is laid responsibility that men may travel in these aeroplanes as safely as if they were sitting by the well in the cool of the evening.

After two wars, I have been in danger too often to bother very much about being killed, and when it comes, I would prefer that it should happen in an aeroplane, since aeroplanes have been the best part of my life.

Half a thou too small," he said. "The difference between Right and Wrong. Half a thou bigger, and it'ld be Right. As it is, it's Wrong, and you can't cheat about it." He smiled again. "Too bad when God gives you the mind of an Inspector, isn't it?

I'm glad we haven't got newspapers now. It's been much nicer without them.

The happily married man with a large family is the test pilot for me.

Everybody pays lip service to the safety of the aeroplane, but nobody is prepared to pay for it.

It was a gambler's action, but his whole life had probably been made up of gambles; it could hardly be otherwise in the outback.

You did not die when you were drawing public assistance money, but you certainly did not remain alive.

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.

Without work men are utterly undone.

The news did not trouble her particularly; all news was bad, like wage demands, strikes, or war, and the wise person paid no attention to it. What was important was that it was a bright, sunny day; her first narcissi were in bloom, and the daffodils behind them were already showing flower buds.

There's no dignity, no decency, or health today for men that haven't got a job. All other things depend on work today.

So let them pass, small people of no great significance, caught up and swept together like dead leaves in the great whirlwind of the war.

An American, a soldier of fortune by profession. Wherever there is trouble in the world the Dwights of all nations foregather. There are not very many of them, thirty or forty perhaps, and they are all supremely competent men because the others have been killed.

Until we're dead, we Service people, the world will always be in danger of another war. We had too good a time in the last one. We'll none of us come out into the open and admit it. It might be better for us if we did. [...] For our generation, the war years were the best time of our lives, not because they were war years but because we were young. The best years of our lives happened to be war years. Everyone looks back at the time when they were in their early twenties with nostalgia, but when we look back we only see the war. We had a fine time then, and so we think that if a third war came we'd have those happy, carefree years all over again. I don't suppose we would - some of us might.

When a good man employs others he becomes a slave to the job, for the job is the guarantee for the security of many men.

I have been asked sometimes what led me to the Persian Gulf, what instinct told me that I could build up a business there. It's really perfectly simple. If you go to the hottest and most uncomfortable place on the map you'll find there's not a lot of competition;

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.

The thing most worth doing in this modern world [is to] create jobs that men can work at, and be proud of, and make money by their work.

It was so beautiful', he said. 'the Three Pagodas Pass must be one of the loveliest places in the world. you've got this broad valley with the river running down it, and the jungle forest, and the mountains ... we used to sit by the river and watch the sun setting behind the mountains, sometimes, and say what a marvellous place it would be to come to for a holiday. however terrible a prison camp may be, it makes a difference if its beautiful.

When you and I are dead, and all the rest of us who served in the last war, in all the countries," she said, "there'll be a chance of world peace. Not till then.

Aircraft do not crash of themselves. They come to grief because men are foolish, or vain, or lazy, or irresolute or reckless. One crash in a thousand may be unavoidable because God wills it so - not more than that.

A gift by women, for women.

There are some things about oneself that it's not very nice to wake up to.

You could have done something with newspapers. We didn't do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We liked our newspapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines about cases of indecent assault, and no Government was wise enough to stop us having them that way. But something might have been done with newspapers, if we'd been wise enough.

She lived in the dream world of unreality, or else she would not admit reality; he did not know. In any case, he loved her as she was. It might never be used, but it would give her pleasure to have it.

It's no good going on living in the ashes of a dead happiness.

Some games are fun even when you lose. Even when you know you're going to lose before you start. It's fun just playing them.

I suppose it is because I have lived rather a restricted life myself that I have found so much enjoyment in remembering what I have learned in these last years about brave people and strange scenes. I have sat here day after day this winter, sleeping a good deal in my chair, hardly knowing if I was in London or the Gulf country, dreaming of the blazing sunshine, of poddy-dodging and black stockmen, of Cairns and of Green Island. Of a girl that I met forty years too late, and of her life in that small town that I shall never see again, that holds so much of my affection.

People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had," she said quietly, staring into the embers. "They don't know what it was like, not being in a camp.

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

If what they say is right we're none of us going to have time to do all that we planned to do. But we can keep on doing it as long as we can.

It's not the end of the world at all," he said. "It's only the end for us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan't be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us.

If I have learned one thing in my 54 years, it is that it is very good for the character to engage in sports which put your life in danger from time to time. It breeds a saneness in dealing with day to day trivialities which probably cannot be got in any other way, and a habit of quick decisions.

He said, "The spring was good enough for their mothers and their grandmothers before them. They will get ideas above their station in life if they have a well." She

Throughout the autumn and the winter activity increased in the Beaulieu area, and with it came mysteries. Lepe House, the mansion at the entrance to the river, was taken over by the Navy and became full of secretive Naval officers; it became known that this was part of a mysterious Navel entity called 'Force J'. Near Lepe House and at the very mouth of the river a construction gang began work in full strength to make a hard, sloping concrete platform running down into the river where the flat-bottomed landing craft could beach to refuel and let their ramps down to embark the vehicles and tanks. This place was about two miles from 'Mastodon'. A mile or so along the coast a country house was occupied by a secret Naval party who did strange things with tugs and wires and winches, and with what looked like a gigantic reel of cotton floating in the sea; this was 'Pluto', Pipe Line Under The Ocean, which was to lay pipes from England to France to carry petrol to supply the armies which were due to land in Normandy. On a bare beach nearby a thousand navvies were camped making huge concrete structures known as 'Phoenix', one of many such sites all along the coast. It was not till after the invasion that it became known that these were a part of the artificial harbour 'Mulberry' on the north coast of France.

She looked at him in wonder. "Do people think of me like that? I only did what anybody could have done."
"That's as it may be," he replied. "The fact is, that you did it.

Everything had come good at last, after so many years. I had reached the happy ending of the story, and I was quietly, serenely happy. In the soft, velvety darkness I lay utterly at peace for I had finished with all heartaches, with all pains and worries; nothing could touch me now. I had finished the book but I could take it up and read it over and over again, and I would do so, secure in the knowledge of the happiness in the last chapter.

To put your life in danger from time to time ... breeds a saneness in dealing with day-to-day trivialities.

Security was now a thing of the past though it took a conscious effort to remember it; with no enemy in all the world there was little but the force of habit in it.

Differential equations won't help you much in the design of aeroplanes - not yet, anyhow.

Men' s souls are naturally inclined to covetousness; but if ye be kind towards women and fear to wrong tgem, God is well acquainted with what ye do.

When I was first sent from H.M.S. King Alfred to be interviewed by Goodeve in the Admiralty, I was furious. The War seemed to me, in June of 1940, to be desperately serious, and England in imminent peril of invasion.

It has been said that an engineer is a man who can do for ten shillings what any fool can do for a pound; if that be so, we were certainly engineers.