Studying English for 20 years gave me a collection of useless quotations that are constantly rattling around in my head. Here are the ones I actually thought it worth writing down!
“I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.
I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.”
Emily Dickinson
“I have learned that to be with those I like is enough.”
Walt Whitman
“These fragments I have shored against my ruin””
TS Eliot
“A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.”
TS Eliot
“It’s a good thing to be loved, even late.”
Samuel Hamilton, East of Eden by John Steinbeck
“Up to 40, girls cost nothing. After that you have to pay money, or tell a story. Of the two it’s the story that hurts most.”
James Bond, Diamonds are Forever by Ian Fleming
“It is an intoxicating moment in any love-affair when, for the first time, in a public place, in a restaurant or a theatre, the man puts his hand down and lays it on the thigh of the girl and when she slips her hand over his and presses the man’s hand against her. The two gestures say everything that can be said. All is agreed. All the pacts are signed. And there is a long minute of silence during which the blood sings.”
Diamonds are Forever by Ian Fleming
[On being asked by Tiffany Case why he had never married] “I expect because I think I can handle life better on my own. Most marriages don’t add two people together. They subtract one from the other.”
James Bond, Diamonds are Forever by Ian Fleming
“She was wearing something blue that did her no harm”
Raymond Chandler
“I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognised apprehension that, here at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.”
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
“What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Mark Twain
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Upton Sinclair
“Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature.”
Michael Faraday
“For a smart girl, you’re good at stupid.”
Georgia, Georgia Rule
“I feel like Dorothy when everything just turned to colour.”
Don Draper, Mad Men
“Hockey puck, rattlesnake, monkey monkey, underpants.”
Lorelai, Gilmore Girls
“You can’t get old as a woman without having at least one lousy man in your life.”
Mr Brooks
[When asked if his whole body was built in proportion to his height] “No, love. If I was I’d be 8′ 10”!
Wade Dooley
“He looks at me like he’s the spoon and I’m the dish of ice-cream.”
The Jane Austen Book Club
“Get your mittens round your kittens.”
Ray Fontayne, Grease
“When they circumcised Herbert Samuel, they threw away the wrong bit.”
Lloyd George
“Ninety per cent of politicians give the other 10 per cent a bad name.”
Henry Kissinger
“I like baseball, movies, fast cars, whisky and you.”
John Dillinger, Public Enemies
“This is her picture as she was:
It seems a thing to wonder on,
As though mine image in the glass
Should tarry when myself am gone.”
The Portrait by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
“The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.”
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
“Here, at the age of 39, I began to be old.”
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
“I brought a jar of anchovy paste, half a dozen potato farls and a packet of my own special blend of Formosan Oolong and Orange Pekoe, but I was set upon by a gang of footpads outside Caius and they stole it all.”
Adrian Healey, The Liar by Stephen Fry
“No woman Veronese looked upon
Was half so fair as thou whom I behold.”
Sonnet on Ellen Terry by Oscar Wilde
“His eyes are sparkling like a rippled sea at sunset.”
Jeremy Clarkson
Hud: You’re a regular idealist
Nephew: What’s wrong with that?
Hud: I don’t know. I just ain’t never tried it.
Hud, Hud
Hud: Let’s get our shoelaces untied. Whaddya say?
Hud, Hud
“I think I’d miss you even if we’d never met.”
Nick, The Wedding Date
“Let me see if I have this straight. You’re going to date a different girl every week for the rest of your life, and then you’re going grow old and die alone in a log cabin by a lake somewhere?”
His ‘n’ Hers Christmas
“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
Mark Twain
“We took risks, we knew that we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last. Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale, but surely, surely, a great rich country like ours will see that those who are dependent on us are properly provided for.”
Message to the Public, Captain Scott
“In one of the Bard’s best thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.”
Anagram of “To be or not to be…”, Hamlet by Shakespeare
“I can remember a reporter asking me for a quote, and I didn’t know what a quote was. I thought it was some kind of soft drink.”
Joe DiMaggio