Old English Sad Quotes & Sayings

An old walrus-faced waiter attended to me; he had the knack of pouring the coffee and the hot milk from two jugs, held high in the air, and I found this entrancing, as if he were a child's magician. One day he said to me - he had some English - "Why are you sad?"
"I'm not sad," I said, and began to cry. Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.
"You should not be sad," he said, gazing at me with his melancholy, leathery walrus eyes. "It must be the love. But you are young and pretty, you will have time to be sad later." The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all the kinds. This is why they have bidets. "It is criminal, the love," he said, patting my shoulder. "But none is worse. — Margaret Atwood

....one of those long, romantic novels, six hundred and fifty pages of small print, translated from French or German or Hungarian or something -- because few of the English ones have the exact feeling I mean. And you read one page of it or even one phrase of it, and then you gobble up all the rest and go about in a dream for weeks afterwards, for months afterwards -- perhaps all your life, who knows? -- surrounded by those six hundred and fifty pages, the houses, the streets, the snow, the river, the roses, the girls, the sun, the ladies' dresses and the gentlemen's voices, the old, wicked, hard-hearted women and the old, sad women, the waltz music -- everything. What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head. 'The house I was living in when I read that book,' you think, or 'This colour reminds me of that book. — Jean Rhys

Wealth is not a sign of dignity, dear Jonah. Only those who put faith above wealth are worthy of this honour. Abandon wealth and devote yourself to serving the cause of faith, and you will deserve eternal bliss. — Viktor Shel

She is off the heart's map and her compass is spinning. — Mark Haddon

I am very curvy, so the vintage stores suit me better than most designers. I just can't seem to give up crisps, or make my boobs shrink for that matter. Alas, I will never fit a size zero. — Marina And The Diamonds

Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game. — V.S. Pritchett

But there's something about him that makes her heart quicken in the way it does when she's surprised. And she supposes that might just be it: the surprises of it all. — Jennifer E. Smith

Alaskans are basically 'leave me alone' type people who respect and embrace different strokes. — Bill O'Reilly

I know what you taste like," I interrupted, my tone harsh. "I know how it feels to have you come against my tongue. What it feels like to have you clench around my cock while you lose your fucking mind. And you, you've tasted me. I've shoved my cock so deep down your throat I felt your tonsils, Danika. Are we going to forget all of that? — R.K. Lilley

Children...wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride,; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well underway. — Annie Dillard

The American doctrinaire is the converse of the American demagogue, and, in this way, is scarcely less injurious to the public. The first deals in poetry, the last in cant. He is as much a visionary on one side, as the extreme theoretical democrat is a visionary on the other. — James F. Cooper