87 Quotes by James Hilton

Surely there comes a time when counting the cost and paying the price aren’t things to think about any more. All that matters is value – the ultimate value of what one does.

If you forgive people enough you belong to them, and they to you, whether either person likes it or not squatter’s rights of the heart.

He was forty-eight – an age at which permanence of habits begins to be predictable.

But that was not all. He foresaw a time when men, exultant in the technique of homicide, would rage so hotly over the world that every precious thing would be in danger, every book and picture and harmony, every treasure garnered through two millenniums, the small, the delicate, the defenseless – all would be lost like the lost books of Livy, or wrecked as the English wrecked the Summer Palace in Pekin.

For the first time in his life he felt necessary – and necessary to something that was nearest his heart. There is no sublimer feeling in the world, and it was his at last.

Have you ever been going somewhere with a crowd and you’re certain it’s the wrong road and you tell them, but they won’t listen, so you just have to plod along in what you know is the wrong direction till somebody more important gets the same idea?

What a host of little incidents, all deep-buried in the past – problems that had once been urgent, arguments that had once been keen, anecdotes that were funny only because one remembered the fun. Did any emotion really matter when the last trace of it had vanished from human memory; and if that were so, what a crowd of emotions clung to him as to their last home before annihilation? He must be kind to them, must treasure them in his mind before their long sleep.

Conway said quietly, “If you’d had all the experiences I’ve had, you’d know that there are times in life when the most comfortable thing is to do nothing at all. Things happen to you and you just let them happen.

I shall be very deeply interested – in due course.