104 Quotes by Nevil Shute

It was incongruous at Coombargana. In a great city such things happen now and then, where people are too strained and hurried to pay much attention to the griefs of others, but in a small rural community like ours, led by wise and tolerant people such as my father and mother, staffed by good types culled and weeded out over the years, such secret, catastrophic griefs do not occur. Troubles at Coombargana had always been small troubles in my lifetime.

We are not like that, we engineers. We are men of understanding and of education, on whom is laid responsibility that men may travel in these aeroplanes as safely as if they were sitting by the well in the cool of the evening.

When things like this happen there’s just nothing to be done about it; even suffering itself is a mere waste of time.

He was just entering the club ahead of me, a tall and rather emaciated man of about seventy, a little unsteady on his feet. He tripped over the doormat as he went in and stumbled forward; the hall porter jumped out and caught him by the elbow.

Then the patience borne of seventy years of disappointments came to his aid;.

Finally he got up, feeling uncommonly well. It did not occur to him that this was because he had a job to do, for the first time in many months.

Half a thou too small,” he said. “The difference between Right and Wrong. Half a thou bigger, and it’ld be Right. As it is, it’s Wrong, and you can’t cheat about it.” He smiled again. “Too bad when God gives you the mind of an Inspector, isn’t it?

People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had, she said quietly, staring into the embers. they don’t know what it was like, not being in a camp.

An American, a soldier of fortune by profession. Wherever there is trouble in the world the Dwights of all nations foregather. There are not very many of them, thirty or forty perhaps, and they are all supremely competent men because the others have been killed.