William McFee

Terrible and sublime thought, that every moment is supreme for some man and woman, every hour the apotheosis of some passion!

It is extraordinary how many emotional storms one may weather in safety if one is ballasted with ever so little gold.

People don't ever seem to realise that doing what's right's no guarantee against misfortune.

While my companion is busily engaged in getting copy for a special article about the Market, I step nimbly out of the way of a swarthy gentleman from Calabria, who with his two-wheeled barrow is the last link in the immense chain of transportation connecting the farmer in the distant tropics and the cockney pedestrian who halts on the sidewalk and purchases a banana for a couple of pennies.

To those who live and toil and lowly die,
Who past beyond and leave no lasting trace,
To those from whom our queen Prosperity
Has turned away her fair and fickle face; To those frail craft upon the restless Sea Of Human Life, who strike the rocks uncharted, Who loom, sad phantoms, near us, drearily, Storm-driven, rudderless, with timbers started; To those poor Casuals of the way-worn earth, The feckless wastage of our cunning schemes, This book is dedicate, their hidden worth And beauty I have seen in vagrant dreams! The things we touch, the things we dimly see, The stiff strange tapestries of human thought, The silken curtains of our fantasy Are with their sombre histories o'erwrought. And yet we know them not, our skill is vain to find The mute soul's agony, the visions of the blind.

The world belongs to the Enthusiast who keeps cool.

There are some men whom a staggering emotional shock, so far from making them mental invalids for life, seems, on the other hand, to awaken, to galvanize, to arouse into an almost incredible activity of soul.

That is my rule of life. If fate means you to lose, give him a good fight anyhow. Do you remember Henley's magnificent lines?
'Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.' ?
That is my gospel. What do you think of it?

A trouble is a trouble, and the general idea, in the country, is to treat it as such, rather than to snatch the knotted cords from the hand of God and deal out murderous blows.

London is always beautiful to those who love and understand that extraordinary microcosm; but at five of a summer morning there is about her an exquisite quality of youthful fragrance and debonair freshness which goes to the heart.

Roses just now predominate. There is a satisfying solidity about the bunches, a glorious abundance which, in a commodity so easily enjoyed without ownership, is scarcely credible. I feel no desire to own these huge aggregations of odorous beauty. It would be like owning a harem, one imagines.

"And what are those things at all?" demands my companion, diverted for a moment from the flowers. She nods towards a mass of dull-green affairs piled on mats or being lifted from big vans. She is a Cockney and displays surprise when she is told those things are bananas. She shrugs and turns again to the musk-roses, and forgets. But to me, as the harsh, penetrating odor of the green fruit cuts across the heavy perfume of the flowers, comes a picture of the farms in distant Colombia or perhaps Costa Rica. There is nothing like an odor to stir memories.

If fate means you to lose, give him a good fight anyhow.

It is so much easier to tell intimate things in the dark.

Responsibility's like a string we can only see the middle of. Both ends are out of sight.