Quotes from book

Decline and Fall

“I expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.”

“Mr. Sniggs, the Junior Dean, and Mr. Postlethwaite, the Domestic Bursar, sat alone in Mr. Sniggs's room overlooking the garden quad at Scone College.”

“It's the seed of life we carry about with us like our skeletons, each one of us unconsciously pregnant with desirable villa residences. There's no escape. As individuals we simply do not exist. We are just potential home builders, beavers, and ants. How do we come into being? What is birth?”

“I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.”

“And the only interest about him arises from the unusual series of events of which his shadow was witness.”

“Please bear in mind throughout that IT IS MEANT TO BE FUNNY.”

“That's the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.”

“I haven't been to sleep for over a year. That's why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn't sleep.”

“There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit.”

“Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying.”

“I couldn't understand why God had made the world at all…' I asked my bishop; he didn't know. He said that he didn't think the point arose as far as my practical duties as a parish priest were concerned..”

“They should have told me that at the end of that gay journey and flower-strewn path were the hideous lights of home and the voices of children.”

“There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief”

“I'm one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.”

“Chokey thinks religion is just divine.”

“But what am I to teach them?' said Paul in sudden panic.”

“We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, and School. Frankly," said Mr Levy, "School is pretty bad…”

“Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.”

“What is this impulse of two people to build their beastly home? It's you & me, unborn, asserting our presence. All we are is a manifestation of the impulse to family life, and if by chance we have escaped the itch ourselves, Nature forces it upon us another way.”