William Plomer Quotes

A rose-red sissy half as old as time.

With first-rate sherry flowing into second-rate whores,
And third-rate conversation without one single pause:
Just like a young couple
Between the wars.

The commonplace needs no defence,
Dullness is in the critic’s eyes,
Without a licence life evolves
From some dim phase its own surprise;Under these yellow-twinkling elms,
Behind these hedges trimly shorn,
As in a stable once, so here
It may be born, it may be born.

A family portrait not too stale to record
Of a pleasant old buffer, nephew to a lord,
Who believed that the bank was mightier than the sword,
And that an umbrella might pacify barbarians abroad:
Just like an old liberal
Between the wars.

We hear a great deal about sex nowadays; it is possible to overestimate its importance, because there are always people who pay it little attention or who apparently manage, like Sir Isaac Newton, to get along, without giving it a thought.

It's so utterly out of the world!
So fearfully wide of the mark!
A Robinson Crusoe existence will pall
On that unexplored side of the Park —
Not a soul will be likely to call!

On a sofa upholstered in panther skin
Mona did researches in .

Oh, the twenties and the thirties were not otherwise designed
Than other times when blind men into ditches led the blind,
When the rich mouse ate the cheese and the poor mouse got the rind,
And man, the self-destroyer, was not lucid in his mind.

Look who's here!
Do come and help us fiddle while Rome burns!

So never say to D'Arcy, 'Be your age!' —
He'd shrivel up at once or turn to stone.

A pleasant old duffer, nephew to a lord,
Who believed that the bank was mightier than the sword,
And that an umbrella might pacify barbarians abroad:
Just like an old liberal
Between the wars.

Brzeska and Brooke were among those she knew
And she lived long enough to meet Lawrences, too,
D. H. and T. E. – she who'd known R. L. S.,
Talked to Hardy of Kim, and to Kipling of Tess!

Out of that bungled, unwise war
An alp of unforgiveness grew.

When her guests were awash with champagne and with gin
She was recklessly sober, as sharp as a pin:
An abstemious man would reel at her look
As she rolled a bright eye and praised his last book.

Who strolls so late, for mugs a bait,
In the mists of Maida Vale,
Sauntering past a stucco gate
Fallen, but hardly frail?