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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 67f9616 | Roberta was the eldest. Of course, Mothers never have favourites, but if their Mother HAD had a favourite, it might have been Roberta. Next came Peter, who wished to be an Engineer when he grew up; and the youngest was Phyllis, who meant extremely well. | E. Nesbit | ||
| 436851a | even the most careful persons make mistakes sometimes--and she must have taken the wrong omnibus, or this story could never have happened, and where should we all have been then? This shows you that even mistakes are sometimes valuable, so do not be hard on grown-up people if they are wrong sometimes. You know after all, it hardly ever happens. | E. Nesbit | ||
| 63c8e9a | no, this was certainly not Streatham Common. The wrong omnibus had brought them to a strange village--the neatest, sweetest, reddest, greenest, cleanest, prettiest village in the world. | E. Nesbit | ||
| cf9b5a2 | THE TOP PART OF PRIDMORE TURNED INTO PAINTED IRON AND GLASS. "Oh, my poor child," said the King, "your maid has turned into an Automatic Machine." | E. Nesbit | ||
| 464eee1 | My boy, you've been like a son to me, but now it's time you got married and had sons of your own. Is there any girl you'd like to marry?' 'No,' said Sep, 'I never did care much for girls.' The old lord laughed. | E. Nesbit | ||
| b5b42ec | All three had been TAUGHT French at school. How deeply they now wished that they had LEARNED it! | E. Nesbit | ||
| cf109dc | Trees are all different, as you know, and I am sure some tiresome person must have told you that there are no two blades of grass exactly alike. But in streets, where the blades of grass don't grow, everything is like everything else. This is why many children who live in the towns are so extremely naughty. They do not know what is the matter with them, and no more do their fathers and mothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, tutors, governesses, a.. | E. Nesbit | ||
| 084e5c3 | I would kiss you on every one of your thousand spears,' she said, 'to give you what you wish.' 'Kiss me once,' it said, 'where my fur is soft. That is all I wish, and enough to live and die for. | E. Nesbit | ||
| dde8d5f | London is like prison for children, especially if their relations are not rich. Of course there are the shops and the theatres, and Maskelyne and Cook's, and things, but if your people are rather poor you don't get taken to the theatres, and you can't buy things out of the shops; and London has none of those nice things that children may play with without hurting the things or themselves -- such as trees and sand and woods and waters. And n.. | E. Nesbit | ||
| 4605dd6 | I'm going to buy buns for tea," said Peter. "I thought you were all so poor," said the Station Master. "So we are," said Peter, confidentially, "but we always have three pennyworth of halfpennies for tea whenever Mother sells a story or a poem or anything." | E. Nesbit | ||
| b8da691 | And now trees arched overhead, and the banks of the road were high and bushy. The adventurers had long since ceased to blow their horns. It was too tiring to go on doing that, when there was no one to be annoyed by it. | E. Nesbit | ||
| 3a55144 | Next day when they had sent the threefold wave of greeting to Father by the Green Dragon, and the old gentleman had waved back as usual, Peter proudly led the way to the station. "But ought we?" said Bobbie. "After the coals, she means," Phyllis explained." | E. Nesbit | ||
| 336956e | After the coals?" repeated Phyllis. "Stop a minute--my bootlace is undone again." "It always IS undone again," said Peter, "and the Station Master was more of a gentleman than you'll ever be, Phil--throwing coal at a chap's head like that." | E. Nesbit | ||
| 4cd34f9 | The sparrows chirped as if they still were proudTheir race in Holy Writ should mentioned be. | Birds | ||
| e7f72aa | He called me un-un-ungentlemanly," sobbed Phyllis. "I didn't never call him unladylike, not even when he tied my Clorinda to the firewood bundle and burned her at the stake for a martyr." Peter had indeed perpetrated this outrage a year or two before. "Well, you began, you know," said Bobbie, honestly, "about coals and all that. Don't you think you'd better both unsay everything since the wave, and let honour be satisfied?" "I will if Peter.. | E. Nesbit | ||
| d569c6a | They reached the station and spent a joyous two hours with the Porter. He was a worthy man and seemed never tired of answering the questions that begin with "Why--" which many people in higher ranks of life often seem weary of. He told them many things that they had not known before--as, for instance, that the things that hook carriages together are called couplings, and that the pipes like great serpents that hang over the couplings are me.. | E. Nesbit | ||
| 16f0008 | In such delightful conversation the time went by all too quickly. The Station Master came out once or twice from that sacred inner temple behind the place where the hole is that they sell you tickets through, and was most jolly with them all. "Just as if coal had never been discovered," Phyllis whispered to her sister. He gave them each an orange, and promised to take them up into the signal-box one of these days, when he wasn't so busy." | E. Nesbit | ||
| 3ef5fb9 | and eyes as bright, | E. Nesbit | ||
| ff6a0d5 | glorious | E. Nesbit | ||
| 5bac636 | Yes," said the King sadly, "I fear there's no doubt about it. Your maid has turned into an Automatic Nagging Machine." | E. Nesbit | ||
| c5b3941 | Sometimes she would sigh when she opened them and say:-- "Another story come home to roost. Oh, dear, Oh, dear!" and then the children would be very sorry." | E. Nesbit | ||
| e3173ee | The nine rubies were used afterwards in agriculture. You had only to throw them out into a field if you wanted it plowed. Then the whole surface of the land turned itself over in its anxiety to get rid of something so wicked, and in the morning the field was found to be plowed as thoroughly as any young man at Oxford. | drinking fairy-tales humor | E. Nesbit | |
| 3cfa10c | Only three people got out of the 11.54. The first was a countryman with two baskety boxes full of live chickens who stuck their russet heads out anxiously through the wicker bars; the second was Miss Peckitt, the grocer's wife's cousin, with a tin box and three brown- paper parcels; and the third-- "Oh! my Daddy, my Daddy!" That scream went like a knife into the heart of everyone in the train, and people put their heads out of the windows t.. | E. Nesbit | ||
| 879287e | The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long,That it had it head bit off by it young. | Birds | ||
| c21f603 | Could the whip-poor-will or the cat of the glen/Look into my eyes and be bold? | Birds | ||
| 16070af | And then the wren gan scippen and to daunce. | Birds | ||
| 84572b0 | Imagine that you have to break someone's arm. Right or left, doesn't matter. The point is that you have to break it, because if you don't...well, that doesn't matter either. Let's just say bad things will happen if you don't. Now, my question goes like this: do you break the arm quickly -- snap, whoops, sorry, here let me help you with that improvised splint -- or do you drag the whole business out for a good eight minutes, every now and th.. | Hugh Laurie | ||
| 9dcbce0 | Not before the harvest is in, and the mules are rested | Hugh Laurie | ||
| 5676bd9 | Thus freedom now so seldom wakes, The only throb she gives, Is when some heart indignant breaks, To show that still she lives. THOMAS MOORE | Hugh Laurie | ||
| b2f411e | This was all horribly wrong. This was red wine with fish. This was a man wearing a dinner jacket and brown shoes. This was as wrong as things get. | red-wine wrong | Hugh Laurie | |
| 0552e55 | there's an undeniable pleasure in stepping into an open-top sports car driven by a beautiful woman. It feels like you're climbing into a metaphor. | Hugh Laurie | ||
| b528396 | she wore a Walther TPH .22 automatic in her right hand. The TPH is a pretty little thing. It has a straight blowback action, a six-round box magazine and two-and-a-quarter-inch barrel. It's also utterly useless as a firearm, because unless you can guarantee hitting either the heart or the brain first time, you're only going to annoy the person you're shooting at. For most people, a wet mackerel is the better choice of weapon. | Hugh Laurie | ||
| 9e03bc8 | Outside my window, the British public traded crack, slept with itself for money, and fought drunken battles it couldn't remember in the morning. | Hugh Laurie | ||
| b46fdea | I dare say being a receptionist at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square gets you a reasonable salary and all the nylon stockings you can eat, | Hugh Laurie | ||
| b7777e2 | Carl waited while I knocked, and when the door opened I came within an ace of slipping a couple of pound coins into his gloved hand and asking him to book me a table at L'Epicure. Luckily, he stopped me by saluting violently, then turned on his heel and set off back down the corridor at a hundred and ten paces to the minute. | Hugh Laurie | ||
| be5cd16 | Not surprisingly, they frisked me like they were taking a frisking exam. To get into the Royal College of Frisking. Five times, head to toe, mouth, ears, crotch, soles of shoes. They tore most of my clothes from my body, and left me looking like an opened Christmas present. | Hugh Laurie | ||
| 6c9953d | We exchanged wry military grins that told each other how much we hated those fly-blown pieces of shit who tied the hands of decent men and called it politics. | Hugh Laurie | ||
| 822ef24 | I didn't feel so bad about the myrrh, because I've never been quite certain what it is. | Hugh Laurie | ||
| 6d00d16 | I thought it might be good for morale to look my bank manager in the eye for the first time in ten years, even if the money in my account wasn't mine. I was shown into a waiting-room outside the manager's office, and given a plastic cup of plastic coffee which was far too hot to drink until, in the space of a hundredth of a second, it suddenly became far too cold. I was trying to get rid of it behind a rubber plant when a nine-year-old boy .. | Hugh Laurie | ||
| c062486 | He picked up the fountain pen and clicked the top on and off a few times while he listened. | Hugh Laurie | ||
| 6763568 | Somewhere a clock ticked. Quite fast. Too fast, it seemed to me, to be counting seconds. But then this was an American building, and maybe Americans had decided that seconds were just too goddamned slow, and how's about a clock that can do a minute in twenty seconds? That way, we get more goddamned hours in a goddamned day than these faggot limeys. | Hugh Laurie | ||
| 2d26d82 | I've been in prison, you see. Only three weeks, and only on remand,but when you've had to play chess twice a day with a monosyllabic West Ham supporter, who has 'HATE' tattooed on one hand, and 'HATE' on the other - using a set missing six pawns, all the rooks and two of the bishops - you find yourself cherishing little things in life. Like not being in prison. | Hugh Laurie | ||
| 1c3b52b | The meter said six pounds, so I passed a ten pound note through the window and watched a fifteen-second production of 'I'm Not Sure I've Got Change For That', starring licensed cab driver 99102, before getting out and heading back down the street. | Hugh Laurie | ||
| 98b8644 | The temperature must have been in the nineties, and there seemed to be far, far too much air in the room. It was bunched and crowded, and in your face and eyes, and it made you think the room was a rush-hour tube train, and a lot of extra air had managed to sneak in just as the doors were closing. | Hugh Laurie |