The Daughter of Time
Josephine Tey
Top 10 Best Quotes
“It's an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don't want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it. If they were merely indifferent it would be natural and understandable. But it is much stronger than that, much more positive. They are annoyed. Very odd, isn't it.”
“The truth of anything at all doesn't lie in someone's account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper, the sale of a house, the price of a ring.”
“Most people's first books are their best anyways. It's the one they wanted most to write.”
“Grant had dealt too long with the human intelligence to accept as truth someone's report of someone's report of what that someone remembered to have seen or been told.”
“That is why historians surprise me. They seem to have no talent for the likeliness of any situation. They see history like a peepshow; with two-dimensional figures against a distant background.”
“A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.”
“Alan Grant: "There are... far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It's a horrible thought." The Midget (his nurse): "You sound constipated.”
“One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn't, of course. It's a small niggling thing.”
“It’s an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don’t want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it.”
“He knew by heart every last minute crack on its surface. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them; rivers, islands, and continents. He had made guessing games of it and discovered hidden objects; faces, birds, and fishes. He made mathematical calculations of it and rediscovered his childhood; theorems, angles, and triangles. There was practically nothing else he could do but look at it. He hated the sight of it.”
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Book Keywords:
historians, mystery, history, good-books, first-books, human-nature, boredom, writing, writing-inspiration, humerous, books, daughter-of-time, philosophical
