Flying Dutch

Quotes

1. It may not be true, but it provides a much-needed focal point for baffled indignation.

   p. 93

2. 

   When he left Quincy's he returned to the studios and went to see the man who was going to tell him everything he needed to know about sports broadcasting in twenty-five minutes.

   “The main thing,” said the expert, is to turn up on the right day at the right place and keep the sound recordists out of the bar. Leave everything else to the cameramen, and you'll do all right. That's it.”

   p. 82

3. 

   Jane was a child of the media age, and there lurked in the back of her mind the instinctive belief that if a thing wasn't on the news, it couldn't really have happened after all.

   p. 203

4. 

   My mother can do it, of course, but then she understands machines. She tapes the Australian soaps, which I call a perverse use of advanced technology.

   p. 81

5. 

   Love? Love was a concept with which he was no longer comfortable. At his age, it did not do to take anything too seriously, and the depressing thing about love was the seriousness which had to go with it, just as these days you couldn't seem to get jumbo sausage and chips in a pub without a salad being thrown in as well.

   p. 190

6. 

   Like fish, accountants see things in a different way from people, and details which people find unimportant are their reason for existing.

   p. 23

7. 

   “Be my guest,” Vanderdecker said. “You can watch a master liar at work, if you don't mind being an accomplice.”

   “Doesn't worry me,” Jane replied, “I’m an accountant.”

   p. 113

8. 

   It was, she admitted to herself as she parked in front of the boatyard, a long shot, a hunch – or, if you preferred English to the language of the talking pictures, a very silly idea.

   p. 99

9. 

   I see what you mean about making a will, actually, although I still maintain that forty quid spent on deciding what's going to happen after you're dead is a waste of good beer money.

   p. 193

10. 

    Well, it's a bit late now, isn't it? Besides, I never could be doing with lawyers. Did you ever meet a lawyer whose life you would willingly have saved in the event of fire? Not me.

    p. 193

11. 

    “I’m afraid you're stuffed, Professor. Talking of which, have an olive.”

    “I do not want an olive, Miss Doland.”

    “More fool you, then,” Jane replied. “It's at times like these you need an olive in order to make sense of things.”

    p. 221

12. 

    An over-excited accountant, like the University of Hull, is a contradiction in terms.

    p. 188

13. 

    What was going to happen now? In the end, every community and grouping of human beings (except, of course, the Rolling Stones) drifts apart and goes its separate ways.

    p. 229

14. 

    If he had any philosophy of life, it was that everything happens by accident, and that at any given time, ninety-nine-point-nine-five per cent of the human race are a confounded nuisance.

    p. 125

15. 

    It is galling, to say the least, to have been to every place in the world and then not know where somewhere is. It's rather like having a doctorate in semiconductor physics and not being able to wire a plug. You begin to wonder whether it's all been worthwhile.

    p. 48

16. 

    “Where shall we go first?”

    “Rekjavík.”

    “Why Rekjavík.”

    “Because we have all the time in the world,” Jane answered, “and I want to save the good bits till later.”

    p. 249

17. 

    “It was basically a form of gambling, and it went something like this.

    “The Fuggers would think of something that was extremely unlikely to happen, and then they would persuade someone to wager them money that it would. Now the proper term for this arrangement is a sucker bet, but the Fuggers wanted to find a respectable name for it, so they called it Insurance. It caught on, just as they knew it would, and soon it became so respectable that they were able to get people to make a new bet every year, and they called this sort of bet a premium.”

    p. 71

18. 

    In a long life, reflected the Flying Dutchman, I have come across many bloody silly ideas, but two of them are in a class of their own for pure untainted idiocy. One was the Court of King Ludwig of Bavaria, and the other is the privatised British telephone service.

    A long way away, definitely in another continent and quite probably in another dimension, a little voice ask him to repeat the name.

    p. 65

19. 

    “Look, miss,” he said, “if you think I'm getting any sort of thrill out of seeing two females in wetsuits and gasmasks chained to a railing, you’re working the wrong pitch. Try Amsterdam.”

    p. 89

20. 

    “What did you think,” he asked – with obvious restraint – “of the music?”

    “I got used to it,” she replied, after a bit. “Like a dripping tap,” she added.

    p. 5

21. 

    His role in history was rather like that of lettuce in the average salad; it achieves no useful purpose, but there's always a lot of it.

    p. 3

22. 

    “So you've never had any urge to rule the world, or anything like that?”

    “What, me?” Vanderdecker said. “No, I can't say I have. It would be nice to change some things, naturally.”

    Jane leaned forward and looked serious. “Such as?”

    Vanderdecker considered. “I don't know,” he said, “now you come to mention it. I can't actually think of anything that even remotely matters. You get such a wonderful sense of perspective at my age.”

    p. 130

That’s all the quotes.

22 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more