Nevil Shute Quotes & Sayings

You felt to look at him that he would be wonderful upon a horse. I — Nevil Shute

Round the next corner and in the next street Adventure lies in wait for you. Oh, who can tell what you may meet Round the next corner and in the next street! Could life be anything but sweet When all is hazardous and new? Round the next corner and in the next street Adventure lies in wait for you. That — Nevil Shute

It's no good going on living in the ashes of a dead happiness. — Nevil Shute

So let them pass, small people of no great significance, caught up and swept together like dead leaves in the great whirlwind of the war. — Nevil Shute

Aircraft do not crash of themselves. They come to grief because men are foolish, or vain, or lazy, or irresolute or reckless. One crash in a thousand may be unavoidable because God wills it so - not more than that. — Nevil Shute

It's not the end of the world at all," he said. "It's only the end for us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan't be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us. — Nevil Shute

Without work men are utterly undone. — Nevil Shute

You did not die when you were drawing public assistance money, but you certainly did not remain alive. — Nevil Shute

You know," he said, "now that I've got used to the idea, I think I'd rather have it this way. We've all got to die one day, some sooner and some later. The trouble always has been that you're never ready, because you don't know when it's coming. Well, now we do know, and there's nothing to be done about it. I kind of like that. I kind of like the thought that I'll be fit and well up till the end of August and then - home. I'd rather have it that way than go on as a sick manfrom when I'm seventy to when I'm ninety. — Nevil Shute

Many evils spring from power," he said. "Even from the power to do good. All power corrupts, and the intention to do good has little influence on the corruption. Either my words will last after me and be believed by men, or else they won't. Yet if one thing were required to kill them certainly, it is that my words should be spread after my death by the power of money. No teaching could survive a campaign of paid advertising. — Nevil Shute

We are not like that, we engineers. We are men of understanding and of education, on whom is laid responsibility that men may travel in these aeroplanes as safely as if they were sitting by the well in the cool of the evening. — Nevil Shute

When a good man employs others he becomes a slave to the job, for the job is the guarantee for the security of many men. — Nevil Shute

I'm glad we haven't got newspapers now. It's been much nicer without them. — Nevil Shute

He was one of that great class of Englishmen who love their wives and trust them unquestioningly with their money and their honour, but are apt to hedge a little over their motor-cars. — Nevil Shute

You cannot argue stupidity, you just have to accept it patiently as one of those things. — Nevil Shute

He was just entering the club ahead of me, a tall and rather emaciated man of about seventy, a little unsteady on his feet. He tripped over the doormat as he went in and stumbled forward; the hall porter jumped out and caught him by the elbow. — Nevil Shute

I didn't wait to see her ship go off, because partings are stupid things and best got over quickly — Nevil Shute

Maybe we've been too silly to deserve a world like this. — Nevil Shute

To put your life in danger from time to time ... breeds a saneness in dealing with day-to-day trivialities. — Nevil Shute

It was so beautiful', he said. 'the Three Pagodas Pass must be one of the loveliest places in the world. you've got this broad valley with the river running down it, and the jungle forest, and the mountains ... we used to sit by the river and watch the sun setting behind the mountains, sometimes, and say what a marvellous place it would be to come to for a holiday. however terrible a prison camp may be, it makes a difference if its beautiful. — Nevil Shute

The happily married man with a large family is the test pilot for me. — Nevil Shute

Half a thou too small," he said. "The difference between Right and Wrong. Half a thou bigger, and it'ld be Right. As it is, it's Wrong, and you can't cheat about it." He smiled again. "Too bad when God gives you the mind of an Inspector, isn't it? — Nevil Shute

After all that I had read during the night. Even into this quiet place the war had reached like the tentacle of an octopus and had touched this girl and brought about her death. Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after it's all over. — Nevil Shute

All those cities, all those fields and farms, with nobody, and nothing left alive. Just nothing there. I simply can't take it in. — Nevil Shute

You can only do a thing for the first time once, and that goes for falling in love. — Nevil Shute

Security was now a thing of the past though it took a conscious effort to remember it; with no enemy in all the world there was little but the force of habit in it. — Nevil Shute

She looked at him in wonder. "Do people think of me like that? I only did what anybody could have done."
"That's as it may be," he replied. "The fact is, that you did it. — Nevil Shute

Everybody pays lip service to the safety of the aeroplane, but nobody is prepared to pay for it. — Nevil Shute

I know you've taken risks to do these things. Do Please be careful."
"Don't worry about me," he said. "You've got enough troubles on your own plate, my word. But we'll come out all right, so long as we just keep alive, that's all we got to do. Just keep alive another two years, till the war's over. — Nevil Shute

Into the world of romance, of make-belief and double brandies! — Nevil Shute

Differential equations won't help you much in the design of aeroplanes - not yet, anyhow. — Nevil Shute

The thing most worth doing in this modern world [is to] create jobs that men can work at, and be proud of, and make money by their work. — Nevil Shute

She lived in the dream world of unreality, or else she would not admit reality; he did not know. In any case, he loved her as she was. It might never be used, but it would give her pleasure to have it. — Nevil Shute

I still think Connie was a human man, a very, very good one - but a man. I have been wrong in my judgments many times before; if now I am ignorant and blind, I'm sorry, but it's no new thing. If that should be the case though, it means that I have had great privileges in my life, perhaps more so than any man alive today. Because it means that on the fields and farms of England, on the airstrips of the desert and the jungle, in the hangars of the Persian Gulf and on the tarmacs of the southern islands, I have walked and talked with God. — Nevil Shute

Here they go cruising for a fortnight up in parts where everyone is dead of radiation, and all that they can catch is measles! — Nevil Shute

After two wars, I have been in danger too often to bother very much about being killed, and when it comes, I would prefer that it should happen in an aeroplane, since aeroplanes have been the best part of my life. — Nevil Shute

I never was in such a horrid office ... It's not very nice to be where people are being swindled all day long, is it? — Nevil Shute

When you and I are dead, and all the rest of us who served in the last war, in all the countries," she said, "there'll be a chance of world peace. Not till then. — Nevil Shute

It has been said that an engineer is a man who can do for ten shillings what any fool can do for a pound; if that be so, we were certainly engineers. — Nevil Shute

The news did not trouble her particularly; all news was bad, like wage demands, strikes, or war, and the wise person paid no attention to it. What was important was that it was a bright, sunny day; her first narcissi were in bloom, and the daffodils behind them were already showing flower buds. — Nevil Shute

I suppose it is because I have lived rather a restricted life myself that I have found so much enjoyment in remembering what I have learned in these last years about brave people and strange scenes. I have sat here day after day this winter, sleeping a good deal in my chair, hardly knowing if I was in London or the Gulf country, dreaming of the blazing sunshine, of poddy-dodging and black stockmen, of Cairns and of Green Island. Of a girl that I met forty years too late, and of her life in that small town that I shall never see again, that holds so much of my affection. — Nevil Shute

If I have learned one thing in my 54 years, it is that it is very good for the character to engage in sports which put your life in danger from time to time. It breeds a saneness in dealing with day to day trivialities which probably cannot be got in any other way, and a habit of quick decisions. — Nevil Shute

A gift by women, for women. — Nevil Shute

Remember that the Clerget lands very fast, at over forty miles an hour, and with that great engine in the nose the tail was light. Watch it ... Lovely. — Nevil Shute

Some games are fun even when you lose. Even when you know you're going to lose before you start. It's fun just playing them. — Nevil Shute

I have been asked sometimes what led me to the Persian Gulf, what instinct told me that I could build up a business there. It's really perfectly simple. If you go to the hottest and most uncomfortable place on the map you'll find there's not a lot of competition; — Nevil Shute

Men' s souls are naturally inclined to covetousness; but if ye be kind towards women and fear to wrong tgem, God is well acquainted with what ye do. — Nevil Shute

It was a gambler's action, but his whole life had probably been made up of gambles; it could hardly be otherwise in the outback. — Nevil Shute

When I was first sent from H.M.S. King Alfred to be interviewed by Goodeve in the Admiralty, I was furious. The War seemed to me, in June of 1940, to be desperately serious, and England in imminent peril of invasion. — Nevil Shute

There's no dignity, no decency, or health today for men that haven't got a job. All other things depend on work today. — Nevil Shute

It was incongruous at Coombargana. In a great city such things happen now and then, where people are too strained and hurried to pay much attention to the griefs of others, but in a small rural community like ours, led by wise and tolerant people such as my father and mother, staffed by good types culled and weeded out over the years, such secret, catastrophic griefs do not occur. Troubles at Coombargana had always been small troubles in my lifetime. — Nevil Shute

You could have done something with newspapers. We didn't do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We liked our newspapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines about cases of indecent assault, and no Government was wise enough to stop us having them that way. But something might have been done with newspapers, if we'd been wise enough. — Nevil Shute

People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had," she said quietly, staring into the embers. "They don't know what it was like, not being in a camp. — Nevil Shute

He said, "The spring was good enough for their mothers and their grandmothers before them. They will get ideas above their station in life if they have a well." She — Nevil Shute

If what they say is right we're none of us going to have time to do all that we planned to do. But we can keep on doing it as long as we can. — Nevil Shute

An American, a soldier of fortune by profession. Wherever there is trouble in the world the Dwights of all nations foregather. There are not very many of them, thirty or forty perhaps, and they are all supremely competent men because the others have been killed. — Nevil Shute