John Buchan Quotes

Remember his mind and no other part of him lived in his new world. He said it gave him an odd sense of detachment to sit in a room among people, and to know that nothing there but himself had any relation at all to the infinite strange world of Space that flowed around them. He would listen, he said, to a great man talking, with one eye on the cat on the rug, thinking to himself how much more the cat knew than the man.

The world was arrogant and self-satisfied, but behind all this confidence there was an uneasy sense of impending disaster. The old creeds, both religious and political, were largely in the process of dissolution, but we did not realise the fact, and therefore did not look for new foundations.

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.

It was strange how fear had gone,now that we knew the worst and had a fighting man by our side.

[On the newspapers of the Craw Press:] Their politics are an opiate to prevent folk thinking.

Russia is mortally sick and therefore all evil is unchained, and the criminals have no one to check them. There is crime everywhere in the world, and the unfettered crime in Russia is so powerful that it stretches its hand to crime throughout the globe and there is a great mobilizing everywhere of wicked men. Once you boasted that law was international and that the police in one land worked with the police of all others. To-day that is true about criminals. After a war evil passions are loosed, and, since Russia is broken, in her they can make their headquarters...

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

Yon Sir Erchibald has poor notions o’ strawtegy.

I never mind choler in a man if he have also honesty and good sense.

I gathered from Hollond that he was always conscious of corridors and halls and alleys in Space, shifting, but shifting according to inexorable laws. I never could get quite clear as to what this consciousness was like. When I asked he used to look puzzled and worried and helpless.

It's the Idea that wins every time — the Idea with brains and guts behind it.

This crowded world of Space was perfectly real to him. How he had got to it I do not know. Perhaps his mind, dwelling constantly on the problem, had unsealed some atrophied cell and restored the old instinct. Anyhow, he was living his daily life with a foot in each world.

They[Australians]'ve all kinds of accents, but you can never mistake their voice. It's got the sun in it. Canadians have got grinding ice in theirs, and Virginians have got butter. So have the Irish. In Britain there are no voices, only speaking-tubes.

I believe everything out of the common. The only thing to distrust is the normal.

though I was afraid of many things, the thing I feared most mortally was being afraid. I