101 Quotes by John Buchan

What’s dooty, if you won’t carry it to the other side of Hell? What’s the use of yapping about your country if you’re going to keep something back when she calls for it? What’s the good of meaning to win the war if you don’t put every cent you’ve got on your stake?... No, Dick, that kind of dooty don’t deserve a blessing. You dursn’t keep anything back if you want to save your soul.

We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.

I loathed having to screw myself up to emergencies late in the day. Such things should take place in the early morning. It was like going over the top in France; I didn’t mind it so much when it happened during a drizzling dawn, when one was anyhow depressed and only half-awake, but I abominated an attack in the cold-blooded daylight, or in the dusk when one wanted to relax.

He felt singularly light-hearted, and the immediate cause was his safety razor. A week ago he had bought the thing in a sudden fit of enterprise, and now he shaved in five minutes, where before he had taken twenty, and no longer confronted his fellows, at least one day in three, with a countenance ludicrously mottled by sticking-plaster.

The eyes were of a color which he could never decide on, afterwards when he told the story he used to say they were the color of everything in Spring.

Five reasonably intelligent men sat in a stupor of impotence, repeating wearily the essentials of a problem which they could not solve.

This is all a tale of an older world and a forgotten countryside. At this moment of time change has come; a screaming line of steel runs through the heather of no-man’s-land, and the holiday-maker claims the valleys for his own. But this busyness is but of yesterday, and not ten years ago the fields lay quiet to the gaze of placid beasts and the wandering stars. This story I have culled from the grave of an old fashion, and set down for the love of a great soul and the poetry of life.

Here were we wretched creatures of men making for each other's throats, and outraging the good earth which God had made so fair a habitation.

It was pretty clear that he was mad, for madness means just this dislocation of the modes of thought which mortals have agreed upon as necessary to keep the world together.