Quotes by Robert Hichens

“He broke away and hurried off. All that he had said had been spoken in a voice so low that only Sir Simon could have heard him. Yet the intensity in his voice had been terrific. Sir Simon felt as if an iron door had been suddenly flung open and had let out a red-hot blast from a furnace.””

“lifted his cup, and drank the rest of his coffee. "May I have another cup?" he said. "It's excellent." The coffee-pot was on the table. Chichester poured out some more. "I will have another cup, too," he said. "How it wakes up the mind.””

“the soldiers starting out vaguely from barracks, not knowing what to do, but free for a time, and hoping, a little heavily, for some adventure to break the military monotony of their lives; the shopgirls, also in hope of something to "take them out of themselves"”

“in the evening rain fell with a gentle persistence. Blank grayness took the town. A breath as of deep autumn was in the air. And the strange sadness of cities, which is like no other sadness, held the spirit of Evelyn Malling as he walked under an umbrella in the direction of Kensington High Street.””

“It is one of the curses of the Church," continued Chichester, "this passion for authority, for ruling, for having all men under one's feet as it were.””

“Evidently Mr. Harding had attractive powers, and Malling began to wonder whether he would have any difficulty in obtaining the seat he wanted, in some corner from which he could get a good view both of the chancel and the pulpit. Were vergers "bribable"? What an ignoramus he was about church matters!””

“The sadness noted by Malling was at first evasive and fleeting, not indellibly fixed in the puckers of a forehead, or in the down-drawn corners of a mouth. It was as a thin, almost impalpable mist, that can scarcely be seen, yet that alters all the features in a landscape ever so faintly.””

“But she had not troubled about the disciplining of her mind.””

“Complete peace seems but a chilly sort of thing to youth in its quick-silver time.””

“Strong lights, noise, the human pressure of crowds, the sight of myriads of faces, the sound of many voices”

“The hectic appeals to something in youth,””

“Time's a brute, but there's still plenty of him for me," she said. "And for you, too." "He isn't half so unpleasant to men as to women," said Craven. "He makes a very unfair distinction between the sexes." "Naturally”

“a certain old duchess who, at the age of eighty, was preparing for a tour round the world when influenza stepped in and carried her off, to the great vexation of Thomas Cook and Son.””

“Alick Craven, who was something in the Foreign Office, had been living in London, except for an interval of military service during the war, for several years, and had plenty of interesting friends and acquaintances, when one autumn day, in a club, Francis Braybrooke, who knew everybody, sat down beside him and began, as his way was, talking of people.””