# J.B. Priestley

- Quotes: 11
- Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/jb-priestley

## Books

- [Angel Pavement](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jb-priestley/angel-pavement.md) — 4 quotes
- [The Good Companions](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jb-priestley/the-good-companions.md) — 7 quotes

## Recently added quotes

> Your mother knows no more about organization than a — a prize rabbit.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jb-priestley/angel-pavement/your-mother-knows.md)

> By the time they reached the hall, they were not so much friends as fellow-conspirators, for Youth, when it is exiled into the kingdoms of the old, at once turns itself into the strongest of secret societies.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jb-priestley/the-good-companions/by-the-time.md)

> Miss Matfield liked her fiction to be full of jungles, coral reefs, plantations, lagoons, hibiscus flowers, the scent of vanilla, schooners on the wide Pacific, tropical nights. So long as the young man was first shown to her dressed in white and lounging on a veranda, while a noiseless brown figure brought him something long and cool to drink, she was ready to follow his love story to the end. If the story had no love in it but had the right exotic setting, she would read it, but she preferred a fairly strong love interest. She had not bad taste, and if the story was written for her by Joseph Conrad, so much the better; but she was ready to endure if not to delight in authors of a very different cut from Conrad if they would only give her the jungles and lagoons and coral reefs and mysterious brown faces. The worst story about Malaysia was preferable to the best story about Marylebone.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jb-priestley/angel-pavement/miss-matfield-liked.md)

> Mrs Bevison-Burr, the commanding woman, came next. Her subject was Unbelief. She referred to Unbelief as if it were a very obnoxious person who was in the habit of insulting her every morning and evening. Mrs Bevison-Burr commanded them to do all manner of things to Unbelief.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jb-priestley/the-good-companions/mrs-bevison-burr-the.md)

> Cathedral cities, market towns, ports forgotten by the sea, spas long out of fashion, all these can decay beautifully, and often their charm increases as the life ebbs out of them. Industrial towns, like steam-engines, are only even tolerable if they are in working order and puffing away.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jb-priestley/the-good-companions/cathedral-cities-market.md)

> She seemed to have had a sudden terrible glimpse of life as it really was, and was ready to weep at the thought of its strange dusty littleness.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jb-priestley/the-good-companions/she-seemed-to-have.md)

> To say that these men paid their shilling to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jb-priestley/the-good-companions/to-say-that.md)

> In this place, whether we call it Bruddersford or Pittford Falls, perfection is not to be found, neither in men nor in the lot they are offered, to say nothing of the tales we tell of them, these hints and guesses, words in the air and gesticulating shadows, these stumbling chronicles of a dream of life.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jb-priestley/the-good-companions/in-this-place.md)

> A man can afford to let himself go in a hen-house.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jb-priestley/the-good-companions/a-man-can.md)

> He was quite capable of talking just as men talk in bad stories in popular magazines, and Miss Matfield had sometimes wondered whether it was because he had read a great many bad stories or because the stories were nearer the truth than one thought and were worked up, on the fringes of Empire, out of men like Major Ansdell.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jb-priestley/angel-pavement/he-was-quite.md)

> She examined his face in that special detached way that all women seem to have at times, looking at your face as if it was not part of you, but something you were showing them, like a picture or a piece of china. Then she nodded wisely at it.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jb-priestley/angel-pavement/she-examined-his.md)