Personal unpleasantness always upset his work; he could not think clearly if his mind was full of hard things that had been said about him, and he li… - Nevil Shute

He was a dark-haired, fresh-faced boy of twenty-one or twenty-two, who adopted the pose that everything was a joke and nothing really mattered.

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

For many years the actress had been out of touch with the hard realities of life. All her working life had been spent in the facile world of honky-tonk, of synthetic emotion and of phoney glamour. Now she was getting a glimpse into a new world, a world of hard, stark facts, a world in which things had to be exactly right or people would be killed. She was beginning to perceive that little insignificant men like Mr Honey were the brains behind that world.