Quotes by Nevil Shute

“Maybe we've been too silly to deserve a world like this.””

“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 man from when I'm seventy to when I'm ninety.””

“It's no good going on living in the ashes of a dead happiness.””

“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.””

“Maybe we've been too silly to deserve a world like this," he said.The scientist said, "That's absolutely and precisely right.””

“You can call a sunset by a filthy name, but you do not spoil its beauty, monsieur.””

“This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.””

“I’d say the way to look at it is this. You took a lot of trouble answering letters from a stranger, and maybe some of them were rather stupid questions. I wouldn’t know. The fact is that you made a friend, and now this friend’s going to a little bit of trouble to help you. That’s fair enough. Look at it that way.””

“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.””

“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.””

“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.””

“By 1948 I was safe on my feet and able to get about quite normally, but I was thirty-four and life was slipping past me. I could not face burial alive in Coombargana at that age after all that I had been and done during the war, and I began to feel I should go crazy if I didn’t get away from it to England again, where things were happening. I think my parents understood, because they made no objection when I suggested that I should go back to Oxford for a year and finish taking my degree. That was five years ago. What I didn’t realise then was that it wasn’t England I was really fretting for. It was my lost youth.””

“Only by an act of treachery to those who believe in us can either of us escape.””