I had never come across commonplace books until I met up with my school friend Paul Foot in Oxford in 1958. The idea, he explained, was that you kept a notebook in which you transcribed anything interesting you came across in the course of your reading. I started doing it the following year. The first two of the following quotes are from D. H. Lawrence, then my favourite writer:
Horace is already a bit of a mellow varsity man who never quite forgot Oxford.
No old world tumbles except when a young one shoves it over. And why should one howl when one’s grandfather is pushed over a cliff? Goodbye, grandfather, now it’s my turn.
Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be believed. (Beachcomber)
Wherewould we be without a sense of humour? (Very slight pause) Germany! (Willie Rushton)
In real life the women pursue the men. It’s only in the novels of Somerset Maugham that the men pursue the women (Sefton Delmer)
There is no reciprocity. Men love women — women love children — children
love hamsters. (Alice Thomas Ellis)Northern people in every country like to think of themselves as more honest and straightforward than those further south. (A.J. P. Taylor)
No politician should ever let himself be photographed in a bathing suit. (Hitler)
The Waughs
When I first went to boarding school at the age of six my father threatened to change my name to something like Stinkbottom. Although I knew he was only joking I never knew quite how far he would take his jokes, and for the first year of school life I lived in dread of every school assembly in case the
headmaster suddenly announced: ‘The boy you have hitherto known as Waugh will in future be called Stinkbottom.’ (Auberon Waugh)I am reading Proust for the first time. I think he was mentally defective. I remember how small I used to feel when people talked about him and didn’t dare admit that I couldn’t get through him. Well I can get through him now — in English of course — because I can read anything that isn’t about politics. Well the chap is plain barmy. He never tells you the age of the hero and on one page he is being taken to the WC in the Champs Elysée by his nurse and the next page he is going to a brothel. Such a lot of nonsense. (Evelyn Waugh, in a letter to John Betjeman)
The pagan soul has been compared to a bird flying through a lighted
hall and out into the darkness. Better, to a bird fluttering about in the
gloom, beating against the windows when all the time the doors are open to the air and sun. (Evelyn Waugh)
God
We apprehend Him in the alternate voids and fullnesses of a cathedral: in the space that separates the salient features of a picture: in the living geometry of a flower, a seashell, an animal: in the pauses and intervals between the notes of music, in their difference and sonority: and finally on the plane of conduct, in the love and gentleness, the confidence and humility which give beauty to the relationship between human beings. (Aldous Huxley)
It is impossible to describe to people brought up on Catholic lines of devotion what an enormous part hymns play in the spiritual life of the ordinary not-very-religious Englishman.(Ronald Knox)
Catholicism is about hard facts. You know the story in St John’s Gospel when Peter ran to the tomb at the time of the Resurrection? The beloved disciple was running behind him, but he caught up and passed him and got there first, and found the sheets piled on the left-hand side of the cave and so on. It is because he describes one disciple catching the other up and passing him that I know it must be true. (Graham Greene)
Nature
Oh, thought I! What a beautiful thing God has made winter to be, by stripping the trees, and letting us see their shapes and forms. (Dorothy Wordsworth)
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. (William Blake)
Useful Tips
A man can be told by his laughter: a bad man looks uglier, a good one more
attractive. (Leo Tolstoy)Start the day with a smile and get it over with. (W. C. Fields)
G. K. Chesterton
Madmen are always serious — they go mad from lack of humour.
The only way of catching a train that I have discovered is to miss the train before. Journalism largely consists of saying ‘Lord Jones is dead’ to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.
Hugh Kingsmill
Shyness is egotism out of its depth.
The well-to-do do not want the poor to suffer. They wish them to be as happy as is consistent with the continued prosperity of the well-to-do.
Death
Mr Williams tells the story of some acquaintance of his who killed himself and left a note in one of his pockets explaining his motive to have been that he was ‘Tired of buttoning and unbuttoning’. (Lord Glenbervie, Journals)
I had always supposed that the whole idea of the thing was that others might make the obituary column but that I was immortal and would go on for ever. I see now that I was mistaken and that I too must in due season hand in my dinner pail. I am not sure that I like the new arrangement, but there it is. (P. G. Wodehouse)
In 1980 she dismissed a butler over an issue concerning crab apples. He took her to an industrial tribunal. Her old friend Lord Longford offered to speak on her behalf, but she assured him, ‘No thank you, I am in quite enough trouble as it is.’ (From the obituary of the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava)
Is there life beyond the gravy? (Stevie Smith)
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