R. D. Blackmore

Quotes

1. If I cared for influence—which means, for the most part, making people do one's will, without knowing it—my first step toward it would be to be called, in common parlance, “slow but sure.”

2. 

   Although a man may be as simple as the flowers of the field; knowing when, but scarcely why, he closes to the bitter wind; and feeling why, but scarcely when, he opens to the genial sun; yet without his questing much into the capsule of himself—to do which is a misery—he may have a general notion how he happens to be getting on.

3. 

   The motives of mankind are plainer than the motions they produce.

4. 

   “Hould thee tongue, lad,' he said sharply; 'us be naigh the Doone-track now, two maile from Dunkery Beacon hill, the haighest place of Hexmoor. So happen they be abroad to-naight, us must crawl on our belly-places, boy.”

5. 

   But whatever lives or dies, business must be attended to; and the principal business of good Christians is, beyond all controversy, to fight with one another.

6. 

   But now, at Dulverton, we dined upon the rarest and choicest victuals that ever I did taste. Even now, at my time of life, to think of it gives me appetite, as once and awhile to think of my first love makes me love all goodness. Hot mutton pasty was a thing I had often heard of from very wealthy boys and men, who made a dessert of dinner; and to hear them talk of it made my lips smack, and my ribs come inwards.

7. 

   “I think, Master Ridd, you cannot know,” she said, with her eyes taken from me, “what the dangers of this place are, and the nature of the people.” “Yes, I know enough of that; and I am frightened greatly, all the time, when I do not look at you.”

8. 

   There was that power all round, that power and that goodness, which make us come, as it were, outside our bodily selves, to share them. Over and beside us breathes the joy of hope and promise; under foot are troubles past; in the distance bowering newness tempts us ever forward. We quicken with largesse of life, and spring with vivid mystery.

9. 

   Least said soonest mended, because less chance of breaking.

10. 

    “Now let us bandy words no more,” said mother, very sweetly; “nothing is easier than sharp words, except to wish them unspoken.”

11. 

    Either love me not at all, or as I love you for ever.

12. 

    Often too I wonder at the odds of fortune, which made me (helpless as I am, and fond of peace and reading) the heiress of this mad domain, the sanctuary of unholiness.