“I sincerely hope, trust, and pray that this part of my journey will not seem as dull to you as it did to me at the time, or as it does to me now while I write of it. But now I come to think of it, it cannot seem as dull, for I had to walk that wretched thirty miles or so all the day long, whereas you have not even to read it; for I am not going to say anything more about it, but lead you straight to the end.Oh, blessed quality of books, that makes them a refuge from living! For in a book everything can be made to fit in, all tedium can be skipped over, and the intense moments can be made timeless and eternal.”
Source: The Path to Rome (1902), p. 201
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Hilaire Belloc 91
writer 1870–1953Related quotes
"That's Why I Love You" (song)
Song lyrics
Source: Gilbert O'Sullivan, "That's Why I Love You" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zpN5iej40E (song on YouTube)
The Age for Love
Context: I bore with the ill-humor of my chief. What would he have said if he had known that I had in my pocket an interview and in my head an anecdote which were material for a most successful story? And he has never had either the interview or the story. Since then I have made my way in the line where he said I should fail. I have lost my innocent look and I earn my thirty thousand francs a year, and more. I have never had the same pleasure in the printing of the most profitable, the most brilliant article that I had in consigning to oblivion the sheets relating my visit to Nemours. I often think that I have not served the cause of letters as I wanted to, since, with all my laborious work I have never written a book. And yet when I recall the irresistible impulse of respect which prevented me from committing toward a dearly loved master a most profitable but infamous indiscretion, I say to myself, "If you have not served the cause of letters, you have not betrayed it." And this is the reason, now that Fauchery is no longer of this world, that it seems to me that the time has come for me to relate my first interview. There is none of which I am more proud.
“It seemed to me that I had no right to burn a book I hadn't even read.”
The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934), A Cold Day
In a letter, Late Sept. 1870 to her sister Edma, from besieged Paris by the Germans; as cited in Impressionist quartet, ed. Jeffrey Meyers; publishers, Harcourt, 2005, p. 107
1860 - 1870
Waste of Paint
Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002)
Alan Axelrod in an interview with Frank R. Shaw, Aug 23, 2007 http://www.electricscotland.com/familytree/frank/axelrod.htm.