Nicolson Quotes & Sayings

Homer then has the bard - a blind man whose name is Demodocus, which means "popular with the people" - say something that drives far into the center of what Homer means and why Homer matters: "The gods did this and spun the destruction of people / For the sake of the singing of men hereafter." The song, this poem, this story, is the divine — Adam Nicolson

In 1925 Woolf began an affair with Sackville-West, who was married to Harold Nicolson, the diplomat and writer, and the development of their close relationship, which does not seem to have undermined either woman's marriage, coincided with Woolf 's most productive years as a writer. — Jane Goldman

I can already feel myself getting fed up with boys and I haven't had anything to do with them yet - Georgia Nicolson — Louise Rennison

We were preparing not Peace only, but Eternal Peace. There was about us the halo of some divine mission. We were bent on doing great, permanent noble things. — Harold Nicolson

For which he had to pay "1 panegyrick poem every year." That is Homeric rent. — Adam Nicolson

Angus is amusing himself by ambushing the postman. Och aye, they may have taken his trouser snake addendums, but they cannae tak his freedom!! — Louise Rennison

Eric Schlosser's book on the economy and strategies of the fast-food business should be read by anyone who likes to take their children to fast-food restaurants. I shall certainly never do that again. He employs a long, cold burn, a quiet and impassioned accumulation of detail, with calm, wit and clarity. ( ... ) Fast Food Nation is witness to the rigour and seriousness of the best American journalism, readable, reliable and extremely carefully done. — Adam Nicolson

Boys are like elastic bands. It doesn't mean that boys are made of elastic, which is a plus because nobody wants a boyfriend made out of rubber. On the other hand, if they were made out of rubber, you could save yourself a lot of time and effort and heartache by just rustling one up out of a car tire. Boys are different from girls. Girls like to be cozy all the time but boys don't. First of all, they like to get all close to you like a coiled-up rubber band, but after a while, they get fed up with being too coiled and need to stretch away to their full stretchiness. Then, after a bit of on-their-own strategy, they ping back to be close to you. So in conclusion on the boy front, you have to play hard to get and also let them be elastic bands. — Louise Rennison

The great secret of a successful marriage is to treat all disasters as incidents and none of the incidents as disasters. — Harold Nicolson

Jas, whatever Tom has under his trousers is between you and him. — Louise Rennison

T's [King James Bible] subject is majesty, not tyranny, and it's political purpose was unifying and enfolding, to elide the kingliness of God with the godliness of kings, to make royal power and divine glory into one invisible garment which could be wrapped around the nation as a whole. — Adam Nicolson

The earliest complete Odyssey to have survived is from the late tenth century, now in Michelangelo's Laurentian Library in Florence, — Adam Nicolson

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind. — Harold Nicolson

The gift of broadcasting is, without question, the lowest human capacity to which any man could attain. — Harold Nicolson

Odysseus is always slipping out, the man who has been everywhere, seen everything, done everything, — Adam Nicolson

The first objects to be designed with the sole purpose of killing another person. — Adam Nicolson

The place has entered me...it has coloured my life like a stain. — Adam Nicolson

Less than the dust beneath thy chariot wheel, less than the weed that grows beside thy door. — Adela Florence Nicolson

Red lips like a living, laughing rose. — Adela Florence Nicolson

For them, and for Homer, impermanence is life's central sorrow and the source of its most lasting pain. — Adam Nicolson

The 19th century had chosen only to remember the happy warrior. The 20th century only the blood come gargling. Both are essential to any understanding of Trafalgar. — Adam Nicolson

Unlike Virgil, Homer is no part of the classical age, has no truck with judicious distinction or the calm management of life and society. He precedes that order, is a preclassic, immoderate, uncompromising, never sacrificing truth for grace. — Adam Nicolson

Let us educate the younger generation to be shy in and out of season: to edge behind the furniture: to say spasmodic and ill-digested things: to twist their feet round the protective feet of sofas and armchairs: to feel that their hands belong to someone else
that they are objects, which they long to put down on some table away from themselves.
For shyness is the protective fluid within which our personalities are able to develop into natural shapes. Without this fluid the character becomes merely standardized or imitative: it is within the tender velvet sheath of shyness that the full flower of idiosyncrasy is nurtured: it is from this sheath alone that it can eventually unfold itself, coloured and undamaged. Let the shy understand, therefore, that their disability is not only an inconvenience, but also a privilege. Let them regard their shyness as a gift rather than as an affliction. Let them consider how intolerable are those of their contemporaries who are not also shy. — Harold Nicolson

These are the two possibilities for human life. — Adam Nicolson

Adam Nicolson has written of the 'powerful absence[s]' that remembered landscapes exert upon us, but they exist as powerful presences too, with which we maintain deep and abiding attachments. These, perhaps, are the landscapes in which we live the longest,warped though they are by time and abraded though they are by distance — Robert Macfarlane

The thing she valued high above the rest, was his strength of character. Stephen Nicolson had the courage of his convictions: he would never let his lover bend his will, and Dorothy liked that; there was a danger, she thought, in the sort of loving that made people act against type. — Kate Morton

Intellectuals incline to be individualists, or even independents, are not team conscious and tend to regard obedience as a surrender of personality. — Harold Nicolson

Only one person in 1000 is a bore, and HE is interesting because he is one person in 1000. — Harold Nicolson

The field is a halfway house, halfway between the detail of those intimately known places and the ignorance of a landscape view ... The essence of a field is that the cultural accommodates the natural there. The human being makes room for and makes use of those organisms that are not him. In that way the field is a poem to symbiosis, and a human contract with the natural. — Adam Nicolson

At that level through out the 18th century, another vision of admirable behavior persisted. The mob did not want the smooth conformable man, the slick hypocrite who could so politely maneuver his way into the rewards of high politics and high society. They wanted his very opposite, the clever thief. The man who thrived not by using the well oiled wheels of society but by opposing them and cheating them; by attending to the well-being of his own heroic self. — Adam Nicolson

Recognizing that I had understood something that evening: the banality of one's own death, so much less terrible than the death of someone you love; — Adam Nicolson

Few things are more agreeable than the spectacle of a man who loses his temper; we should be grateful to such people for providing us with moments of often unsullied delight. — Harold Nicolson

How can you think you won't hold my attention? I'm intrigued by everything about you. — Kelly Nicolson

Berlin stimulates like arsenic. — Harold Nicolson

Very occasionally, a simplified form of communion and of adult baptism for new members of the church would be enacted but no Separatist was ever married in church, because there is no hint of a marriage ceremony in scripture and the primitive church had not considered marriage a sacrament before AD 537. — Adam Nicolson

What in the name of Hitler's panties and matching bra set was she talking about? — Louise Rennison

One eighteenth-century bard was given a lovely estate in Harris by his MacLeod chief, — Adam Nicolson

The Enquiry in England,' Blake said, 'is not whether a man has talents and genius, but whether he is passive and polite and a virtuous ass and obedient to noblemen's opinions in arts and science. — Adam Nicolson

Often devotion to virtue arises from sated desire. — Adela Florence Nicolson

These, then, are the qualities of my ideal diplomatist. Truth, accuracy, calm, patience, good temper, modesty and loyalty. They are also the qualities of an ideal diplomacy. But, the reader may object, you have forgotten intelligence, knowledge, discernment, prudence, hospitality, charm, industry, courage and even tact. I have not forgotten them. I have taken them for granted. — Harold Nicolson

Biology
The film turns out to be about bees. It is a film about a bee center. How crap is this going to be?
An hour later
That was the best thing I have seen for ages. We made Miss Wilson rewind the bit where the two queens were having a bitch fight. — Louise Rennison

We are all inclined to judge ourselves by our ideals; others by their acts. — Harold Nicolson

There are 201 words in the Iliad and the Odyssey that occur only once in Homer and never again in the whole of Greek literature. — Adam Nicolson

I don't know what's going on with Mum and Dad, but it's weird. Mum keeps asking Dad to do things and he keeps doing them Unfotunately, she hasn't said 'Hand over your money and make your way to Europe! — Louise Rennison

Every schoolmaster after the age of forty-nine, is inclined to flatulence is apt to swallow frequently and to puff — Harold Nicolson

A poet who knew that a war leader in his speech on the eve of battle will be both a man of civilization and its raging opposite. — Adam Nicolson

The language of the King James Bible is the language of patriarchy, of an instructed order, of richness as a form of beauty, of authority as a form of good; the New English Bible is motivated by the opposite, an anxiety not to bore or intimidate. It is driven, in other words, by the desire to please and, in that way, is a form of language which has died. — Adam Nicolson

I shall go the way of the open sea, to the lands I knew before you came, and the cool ocean breezes shall blow from me the memory of your name. — Adela Florence Nicolson

As the generation of leaves, so too is the generation of men. And as for leaves, the winds scatter some on the earth, But the new wood puts forth others, and spring comes again. So it is with men: as one generation is born, another dies. — Adam Nicolson

House of Commons: 'You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.' Later this speech was generally cited as a classic example of determination and courage, but the reactions at the time were not all that enthusiastic. In his diary, Harold Nicolson noted: 'When Chamberlain enters the House he gets a terrific reception, when Churchill comes in the applause is less.' Many of the British, including King George VI and most of the Conservatives, considered Churchill in those days to be a warmonger and a dangerous adventurer. There was a strong undercurrent in favour of reaching an accord with Hitler. — Geert Mak

For this is wisdom: to live, to take what fate, or the Gods, may give. — Adela Florence Nicolson

Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar, where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell? — Adela Florence Nicolson

How many times do we all have to do this? Get up, go to school, again? Before everyone admits it's a crap idea? — Louise Rennison

When uncle Eddie does his impression of 'Like a Virgin' it's like Madonna is coming out of his body!'
Christ what an image. — Louise Rennison

You've said before, Ms. Nicolson, that your mother was a strong woman. She lived through the war, — Kate Morton

Dad leapt over the garden wall instead of going through the gate. Sadly he didn't do himself a severe injury, and so he lives to embarrass me to death another day. — Louise Rennison

That long-gone sense of innocence and trust now reminded her of the feeling she now had when about to put on a new dress, or when given a box of chocolates sealed up in its wrapper. Everything was lovely in the anticipation. There must have been a time, she thought wistfully, when disappointment was an undiscovered emotion. — Juliet Nicolson

His muse walked the streets with the others but she wore galoshes and was terribly afraid of being recognized. — Harold Nicolson

He says we should take it easy and that maybe he overreacted a bit."
Dave said, "A bit? That's like Hitler saying, 'Oooh, I just meant to go for a little walk, but then I accidentally invaded Poland. — Louise Rennison

This was all evidence of the tradition at work, of Homer being more interested in epic music than its meaning. — Adam Nicolson

We are wanderers, place shifters, the cosmic homeless. This is not a modern truth, and Achilles is not some new kind of existentialist hero. It is the oldest truth of all, surviving uncomfortably into the modern world of cities and overkings, diplomacy and accommodation, the power structures and the proliferation of stuff which the Mediterranean world provides. — Adam Nicolson

Rosie laughed in a not too reassuring way if you like sane laughter. — Louise Rennison

in 1944 the Germans executed brutal, slaughtering attacks on the people of mountain Crete. — Adam Nicolson

Your soul shines through even if you haven't got mascara on — Louise Rennison

Coaches should realize that the only way to conquer drudgery is by getting through it as efficiently as they can. A dull job slackly done becomes twice as dull, whereas a dull job performed as efficiently as possible becomes half as dull. Effort appears to be the main art of living. — Harold Nicolson

A puritan is such a one as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbor with all his heart. — Adam Nicolson

It must be confessed that the English gentleman, especially if he be devoted to field and other sports, is apt to attribute slight importance to mental felicity or learning. I happen to enjoy the system, having suffered much on the continent from people who pretend to be intellectuals when they are not. Yet it is undeniable that a type of civility that excludes or misprises the humanities compares ill with the ideal of the perfectly endowed and developed human being which the Greeks and the best teachers of the Renaissance held as examples for emulation. — Harold Nicolson

The worst thing, I fear, about being no longer young is that one is no longer young. — Harold Nicolson

The first printed Greek Homer had appeared in 1488, in Florence, published by an Athenian, Demetrius Chalcondyles, — Adam Nicolson

There will be no peace until the violence is done. Peace is inaccessible without the violence, because violence is righteousness in action. — Adam Nicolson

The daughter of the literary biographer Leslie Stephen, and close friend of the innovative biographer of the Victorians, Lytton Strachey, Woolf herself put forward, in 'The New Biography' (1927) (reviewing work by another biographer acquaintance, Harold Nicolson), her own memorable theory of biography, encapsulated in her phrase 'granite and rainbow'. 'Truth' she envisions 'as something of granite-like solidity', and 'personality as
something of rainbow-like intangibility', and 'the aim of biography', she proposes, 'is to weld these two into one seamless whole' (E4 473). The following short biographical account ofWoolf will attempt to keep to the basic granitelike facts that Woolf novices need to know, while also occasionally attending in brief to the more elusive, but equally relevant, matter of rainbow-like personality. — Jane Goldman

Vita Sackville-West is one of my favorite female icons. She was a writer and a prolific gardener, but she also had a relationship with Virginia Woolf, and she was married to Sir Harold Nicolson. She was a woman who lived outside of norms. — Gwendoline Christie

In those days, now it was in those days, In those nights, now it was in those nights, In those years, now it was in those years — Adam Nicolson

The Irish do not want anyone to wish them well; they want everyone to wish their enemies ill. — Harold Nicolson

It is, in other words, the King James Bible's exact contemporary, the product of precisely the same cultural moment, produced from precisely the same court culture, with precisely the same intention of celebrating and in a certain sense 'housing' James I and his dream of majesty. Can Hatfield House, then, be read as a companion to the Bible whose genesis is so close to its own? — Adam Nicolson

Iliad's subject is not war or its wickedness but a crisis in how to be. — Adam Nicolson