Quotes from book
Three Men in a Boat
Three Men in a Boat , published in 1889, is a humorous account by English writer Jerome K. Jerome of a two-week boating holiday on the Thames from Kingston upon Thames to Oxford and back to Kingston. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history along the route, but the humorous elements took over to the point where the serious and somewhat sentimental passages seem a distraction to the comic novel. One of the most praised things about Three Men in a Boat is how undated it appears to modern readers – the jokes have been praised as fresh and witty.The three men are based on Jerome himself and two real-life friends, George Wingrave and Carl Hentschel , with whom Jerome often took boating trips. The dog, Montmorency, is entirely fictional but, "as Jerome admits, developed out of that area of inner consciousness which, in all Englishmen, contains an element of the dog". The trip is a typical boating holiday of the time in a Thames camping skiff. This was just after commercial boat traffic on the Upper Thames had died out, replaced by the 1880s craze for boating as a leisure activity.Following the overwhelming success of Three Men in a Boat, Jerome later published a sequel, about a cycling tour in Germany, titled Three Men on the Bummel .
“I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”
Variant: I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
Source: Three Men in a Boat (1889), Ch. 15.
Context: It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.
“We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can't do without.”
Source: Three Men in a Boat
“I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.”
Source: Three Men in a Boat
Source: Three Men in a Boat (1889), Ch. 1.
Source: Three Men in a Boat (1889), Ch. 3.
Source: Three Men in a Boat (1889), Ch. 6.
Source: Three Men in a Boat (1889), Ch. 15.
