Cakes And Ale Quotes

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It's no good trying to keep up old friendships. It's painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard)
Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear.
Aesop
Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?
William Shakespeare (Twelfth Night)
Dost think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?" (Twelfth Night)
William Shakespeare
The ideal has many names and beauty is but one of them.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard)
No, Father. I lack for nothing. I have my meal cakes and my ale. I have my shadows and my colors. And there is the smell of time passing. I need nothing more.
Harlan Ellison (I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream)
It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard)
The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
Roy has always sincerely believed what everyone else believed at the moment.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
Enjoy yourself while you have the chance, I say; we shall all be dead in a hundred years and what will anything matter then?
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
As we grow older we become more conscious of the complexity, incoherence, and unreasonableness of human beings; this indeed is the only excuse that offers for the middle-aged or elderly writer, whose thoughts should more properly be turned to graver matters, occupying himself with the trivial concerns of imaginary people. For if the proper study of mankind is man it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial, and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard)
I saw that Roy was not inclined to be amused. I was not annoyed, for I am quite used to people not being amused at my jokes. I often think that the purest type of the artist is the humorist who laughs alone at his own jests.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
The crown of literature is poetry. It is the end and aim. It is the sublimest activity od the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
Everything was soft about her, her voice, her smile, her laugh; her eyes, which were small and pale, had the softness of flowers; her manner was as soft as the summer rain.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
She had the serenity of a summer evening when the light fades slowly from the unclouded sky.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
I have great affection for you, Roy" I answered, "but I don't think you are the sort of person I'd care to have breakfast with.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
I have noticed that when I am most serious people are apt to laugh at me, and indeed when after a lapse of time I have read passages that I wrote from the fullness of my heart I have been tempted to laugh at myself. It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
He was so pleasant that his fellow writers, his rivals and contemporaries, forgave him even the fact that he was a gentleman.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
Beauty does not look with good grace on the timid advances of Humour.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
You’re so sharp you’ll cut yourself if you don’t look out,
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
I do not know if others are like myself, but I am conscious that I cannot contemplate beauty long.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
laugh while you’ve got the chance, you won’t laugh much when you’re dead and buried.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country. This is not so strange when you reflect that from the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture...
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard)
the hopes that had been cherished there, the bright visions of the future, the flaming passion of youth; the regrets, the disillusion, the weariness, the resignation; so much had been felt in that room, by so many, the whole gamut of human emotion, that it seemed strangely to have acquired a troubling and enigmatic personality of its own.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
The ideal has many names and beauty is but one of them... Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all: that is why the criticism of art, except in so far as it is unconcerned with beauty and therefore with art, is tiresome... Beauty is that which satisfies the aesthetic instinct. But who wants to be satisfied? It is only the dullard that enough is as good as a feast. Let us face it: beauty is but a bore.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
Deprecatingly, fully conscious of his audacity in asking so busy a man to waste his time on a neophyte’s puny effort, he begged for criticism and guidance.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue;
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
We were staggered and immediately on the defensive, for she looked intellectual, and it made us feel shy.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
and then the critics, going back to the novels of his maturity, found that their English had a nervous, racy vigour that eminently suited the matter.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
The elect sneer at popularity; they are inclined even to assert that it is a proof of mediocrity;
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
She was like a silvery flower of the night that only gave its perfume to the moonbeams.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
I always found Dickens very coarse. I don't want to read about people who drop their aitches.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
I watched Edward Driffield. He was talking to Lady Hodmarsh. She was apparently telling him how to write a novel and giving him a list of a few that he really ought to read.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
Philosophy only seems to offer endless dispute, with no cakes and ale.
Keith Ward (God: A Guide for the Perplexed)
Beauty is a blind alley. It is a mountain peak which once reached leads nowhere […] Beauty is that which satisfies the aesthetic instinct. But who wants to be satisfied? It is only to the dullard that enough is as good as a feast. Let us face it: beauty is a bit of a bore.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
Don’t talk to me about the country. The doctor said I was to go there for six weeks last summer. It nearly killed me, I give you my word. The noise of it. All them birds singin’ all the time, and the cocks crowin’ and the cows mooin’. I couldn’t stick it. When you’ve lived all the years I ’ave in peace and quietness you can’t get used to all that racket goin’ on all the time.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
In the novels I had read whenever lovely woman stooped to folly she had a baby. The cause was put with infinite precaution, sometimes indeed suggested only by a row of asterisks, but the result was inevitable.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
I had not then acquired the technique that I flatter myself now enables me to deal competently with the works of modern artist. If this were the place I could write a very neat little guide to enable the amateur of pictures to deal to the satisfaction of their painters with the most diverse manifestations of the creative instinct. There is the intense ‘By God!’ that acknowledges the power of the ruthless realist, the ‘It’s so awfully sincere’ that covers your embarrassment when you are shown the coloured photograph of an alderman’s widow, the low whistle that exhibits your admiration for the post-impressionist, the ‘Terribly amusing’ that expresses what you feel about the cubist, the ‘Oh!’ of one who is overcome, the ‘Ah!’ of him whose breath is taken away.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
Owing to the rise of prices Mrs. Hudson was able to get more for her rooms than in my day, and I think in her modest way she was quite well off. But of course people wanted a lot nowadays. “You wouldn’t believe it, first I ’ad to put in a bathroom, and then I ’ad to put in the electric light, and then nothin’ would satisfy them but I must ’ave a telephone. What they’ll want next I can’t think.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
I began to meditate upon the writer's life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world's indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit to a good grace of its hazards...But he has one compensation, Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as a theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
I accompanied her down to the first floor and she knocked at a door. She was told to come in, and when she opened it I caught sight of a stout woman with gray hair elaborately marcelled. She was reading a book. Apparently everyone at the Bear and Key was interested in literature.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
For instance, he had a habit that poor Amy had a lot of trouble to break him of : after he’d finished his meat and vegetables he’d take a piece of bread and wipe the plate clean with it and eat it.” “Do you know what that means?” I said. “It means that for long he had so little to eat that he couldn’t afford to waste any food he could get.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
can only step aside when the poet passes; he makes the best of us look like a piece of cheese.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
But she looked well and healthy and full of beans.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
She had a heart of gold (though I did not know it then, for when you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right)
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
I had. It was Ivanhoe. I had read it when I was ten, and the notion of reading it again and writing an essay on it bored me to distraction
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
His women difficultly come to life.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
He is the only free man.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
but on occasion trips on a light fantastic toe;
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
No one has ever been able to explain why the Doric temple of Pæstum is more beautiful than a glass of cold beer except by bringing in considerations that have nothing to do with beauty.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
[Their marriage] will not be all cakes and ale.... They are too much alike to be the ideal match. Patty is thick-skinned and passionate, too ready to be hurt to the heart by the mere little pinpricks and mosquito bites of life; and Paul is proud and crotchety, and, like the great Napoleon, given to kick the fire with his boots when he is put out. There will be many little gusts of temper, little clouds of misunderstanding, disappointments, and bereavements, and sickness of mind and body; but with all this, they will find their lot so blessed, by reason of the mutual love and sympathy tat, through all the vicissitudes, will surely grow deeper and stronger every day they live together, that they will not know how to conceive a better one.
Ada Cambridge (The three Miss Kings (Virago modern classics))
On his advice I read The Craft of Fiction by Mr. Percy Lubbock, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Henry James; after that I read Aspects of the Novel by Mr. E. M. Forster, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Mr. E. M. Forster; then I read The Structure of the Novel by Mr. Edwin Muir, from which I learned nothing at all.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
Mrs. Driffield used to remain in the churchyard while we were at work, not reading or sewing, but just mooning about; she seemed able to do nothing for an indefinite time without feeling bored.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
I always think it a pity that, fashion having decided that the doings of the aristocracy are no longer a proper subject for serious fiction, Roy, always keenly sensitive to the tendency of the age, should in his later novels have confined himself to the spiritual, conflicts of solicitors, chartered accountants, and produce brokers. He does not move in these circles with his old assurance.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
Besides, at the back of his gaiety I vaguely felt a slight apprehension. Had I not known that he was in a prosperous state I should have suspected that he was going to borrow a hundred pounds from me.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
I’m not very fond of staying with people,” I said. “I hate getting up for a nine-o’clock breakfast to eat things I have no mind to. I don’t like going for walks, and I’m not interested in other people’s chickens.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
His second novel was successful, but not so successful as to arouse the umbrageous susceptibilities of his competitors. In fact it confirmed them in their suspicions that he would never set the Thames on fire. He was a jolly good fellow; no side, or anything like that: they were quite content to give a leg up to a man who would never climb so high as to be an obstacle to themselves. I know some who smile bitterly now when they reflect on the mistake they made.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
Then it might interest you to know,” said Mrs. Encombe, “that when I was in Florence last Easter I was introduced to Ouida.” “That’s quite another matter,” returned Mrs. Hayforth. “I can’t believe that any lady would read a book by Ouida.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
I have noticed that when I am most serious people are apt to laugh at me, and indeed when after a lapse of time I have read passages that I wrote from the fullness of my heart I have been tempted to laugh at myself. It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant on an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
I was shocked and thrilled by what Mary-Ann told me, but I had difficulty in believing it. I had read too many novels and had learnt too much at school not to know a good deal about love, but I thought it was a matter that only concerned young people. I could not conceive that a man with a beard, who had sons as old as I, could have any feelings of that sort. I thought when you married all that was finished. That people over thirty should be in love seemed to me rather disgusting.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
It is strange (and instructive) to read now the book that created such a sensation; there is not a word that could bring a blush to the cheek of the most guileless, not an episode that could cause the novel reader of the present day to turn a hair.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
They told me Carlyle was a great writer and I was ashamed that I found the French Revolution and Sartor Resartus unreadable. Can anyone read them now? I thought the opinions of others must be better than mine and I persuaded myself that I thought George Meredith magnificent. In my heart I found him affected, verbose, and insincere. A good many people think so too now. Because they told me that to admire Walter Pater was to prove myself a cultured young man, I admired Walter Pater, but heavens how Marius bored me!
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
I did not pay much attention, and since it seemed to prolong itself I began to meditate upon the writer’s life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world’s indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit with a good grace to its hazards. He depends upon a fickle public. He is at the mercy of journalists who want to interview him and photographers who want to take his picture, of editors who harry him for copy and tax gatherers who harry him for income tax, of persons of quality who ask him to lunch and secretaries of institutes who ask him to lecture, of women who want to marry him and women who want to divorce him, of youths who want his autograph, actors who want parts and strangers who want a loan, of gushing ladies who want advice on their matrimonial affairs and earnest young men who want advice on their compositions, of agents, publishers, managers, bores, admirers, critics, and his own conscience. But he has one compensation. Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as the theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
I used to think that one day I should write a really great novel, but I've long ceased even to hope for that. All I want people to say is that I do my best. I do work. I never let anything slipshod get past me. I think I can tell a good story and I can create characters that ring true.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
And sometimes the road was only a lane, with thick hawthorn hedges, and the green elms overhung it on either side so that when you looked up there was only a strip of blue sky between. And as you rode along in the warm, keen air you had a sensation that the world was standing still and life would last for ever.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
I do not know that the people I lived among were pretentious in the sense of making themselves out to be richer or grander than they really were, but looking back it does seem to me that they lived a life full of pretences. They dwelt behind a mask of respectability. You never caught them in their shirt sleeves with their feet on the table.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
I remembered the description very well. It was harrowing. There was nothing sentimental in it; it did not excite the reader’s tears, but his anger rather that such cruel suffering should be inflicted on a little child. You felt that God at the Judgment Day would have to account for such things as this. It was a very powerful piece of writing.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
I HAVE noticed that when someone asks for you on the telephone and, finding you out, leaves a message begging you to call him up the moment you come in, and it’s important, the matter is more often important to him than to you. When it comes to making you a present or doing you a favour most people are able to hold their impatience within reasonable bounds.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
The wise always use a number of ready-made phrases (at the moment I write ‘nobody’s business’ is the most common), popular adjectives (like ‘divine’ or ‘shy-making’), verbs that you only know the meaning of if you live in the right set (like ‘dunch’), which give a homely sparkle to small talk and avoid the necessity of thought. The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried this device to such perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
One of the difficulties that a man has to cope with as he goes through life is what to do about the persons with whom he has once been intimate and whose interest for him has in due course subsided. If both parties remain in a modest station the break comes about naturally, and no ill feeling subsists, but if one of them achieves eminence the position is awkward.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
Roy was very modest about his first novel. It was short, neatly written, and, as is everything he has produced since, in perfect taste. He sent it with a pleasant letter to all the leading writers of the day, and in this he told each one how greatly he admired his works, how much he had learned from his study of them, and how ardently he aspired to follow, albeit at a humble distance, the trail his correspondent had blazed. He laid his book at the feet of a great artist as the tribute of a young man entering upon the profession of letters to one whom he would always look up to as his master. Deprecatingly, fully conscious of his audacity in asking so busy a man to waste his time on a neophyte’s puny effort, he begged for criticism and guidance.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
Yes’m, he came to the front door.” There was a moment’s awkwardness. Everyone was at a loss to know how to deal with such an unusual occurrence, and even Emily, who knew who should come to the front door, who should go to the side door, and who to the back, looked a trifle flustered. My aunt, who was a gentle soul, I think felt honestly embarrassed that anyone should put himself in such a false position;
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
The thought occurred to me, but I noticed that he did not run in the direction of the river, but plunged into the meaner streets of the neighbourhood in which we had been walking. And I reflected also that there is no example in literary history of an author committing suicide while engaged on the composition of a literary work. Whatever his tribulations, he is unwilling to leave to posterity an uncompleted opus.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
The past I looked at seemed to have lost its reality and I saw it as though it were a scene in a play and I a spectator in the back row of a dark gallery. But it was all very clear as far as it went. It was not misty like life as one leads it when the ceaseless throng of impressions seems to rob them of outline, but sharp and definite like a landscape painted in oils by a painstaking artist of the middle-Victorian era.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
One or two. I didn’t think half as much of Newman as I do now, and I thought a great deal more of the tinkling quatrains of Fitzgerald. I could not read Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister; now I think it his masterpiece.” “And what did you think much of then that you think much of still?” “Well, Tristram Shandy and Amelia and Vanity Fair. Madame Bovary, La Chartreuse de Parme, and Anna Karenina. And Wordsworth and Keats and Verlaine.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
As authors will, I ran my eye round quickly to see if there were any of mine, but could not find one; I saw, however, a complete set of Alroy Kear’s and a great many novels in bright bindings, which looked suspiciously unread; I guessed that they were the works of authors who had sent them to the master in homage to his talent and perhaps the hope of a few words of eulogy that could be used in the publisher’s advertisements.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
Many authors from their preoccupation with words have the bad habit of choosing those they use in conversation too carefully. They form their sentences with unconscious care and say neither more nor less than they mean. It makes intercourse with them somewhat formidable to persons in the upper ranks of society whose vocabulary is limited by their simple spiritual needs, and their company consequently is sought only with hesitation.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
But he has one compensation. Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as a theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
Though I knew theoretically what people did when they were married, and was capable of putting the facts in the bluntest language, I did not really understand it. I thought it indeed rather disgusting and I did not quite, quite believe it. After all, I was aware that the earth was round, but I knew it was flat. Mrs. Driffield seemed so frank, her laugh was so open and simple, there was in her demeanour something so young and childlike, that I could not see her “going with” sailors and above all anyone so gross and horrible as Lord George. She was not at all the type of the wicked woman I had read of in novels. Of course I knew she wasn’t “good form” and she spoke with the Blackstable accent, she dropped an aitch now and then, and sometimes her grammar gave me a shock, but I couldn’t help liking her. I came to the conclusion that what Mary-Ann had told me was a pack of lies.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
Mrs. Humphry Ward. She was a woman of the very highest character, a niece of Mr. Matthew Arnold, and whatever you might think of the book itself (and she, Mrs. Encombe, was quite willing to admit that there were parts which had better have been omitted) it was quite certain that she had written it from the very highest motives. Mrs. Encombe knew Miss Broughton too. She was of very good family and it was strange that she wrote the books she did.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
The elect sneer at popularity; they are inclined even to assert that it is a proof of mediocrity; but they forget that posterity makes its choice not from among the unknown writers of a period, but from among the known. It may be that some great masterpiece which deserves immortality has fallen still-born from the press, but posterity will never hear of it; it may be that posterity will scrap all the best sellers of our day, but it is among them that it must choose.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
I don’t mind your saying so at all. I don’t think it is. But you asked me why I believed in my own judgment, and I was trying to explain to you that, whatever I said out of timidity and in deference to the cultured opinion of the day, I didn’t really admire certain authors who were then thought admirable and the event seems to show that I was right. And what I honestly and instinctively liked then has stood the test of time with me and with critical opinion in general.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
Beauty is a blind alley. It is a mountain peak which once reached leads nowhere. That is why in the end we find more to entrance us in El Greco than in Titian, in the incomplete achievement of Shakespeare than in the consummate success of Racine. Too much has been written about beauty. That is why I have written a little more. Beauty is that which satisfies the aesthetic instinct. But who wants to be satisfied? It is only to the dullard that enough is as good as a feast. Let us face it : beauty is a bit of a bore.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
The rooms I occupied were on the ground floor. The parlour was papered with an old marbled paper and on the walls were water colours of romantic scenes, cavaliers bidding good-bye to their ladies and knights of old banqueting in stately halls; there were large ferns in pots, and the armchairs were covered with faded leather. There was about the room an amusing air of the eighteen eighties, and when I looked out of the window I expected to see a private hansom rather than a Chrysler. The curtains were of a heavy red rep.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
Sometimes the novelist feels himself like God and is prepared to tell you everything about his characters; sometimes, however, he does not; and then he tells you not everything that is to be known about them but the little he knows himself; and since as we grow older we feel ourselves less and less like God I should not be surprised to learn that with advancing years the novelist grows less and less inclined to describe more than his own experience has given him. The first person singular is a very useful device for this limited purpose.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
Loaves of fig and pepper bread, of course. But there was also lasagna cooked in miniature pumpkins, and pumpkin-seed brittle. Roasted red pepper soup, and spiced caramel potato cakes. Corn muffins and brown sugar popcorn balls and a dozen cupcakes, each with a different frosting, because what was first frost without frosting? Pear beer and clove ginger ale in dark bottles sat in the icy beverage tub. They ate well into the afternoon, and the more they ate, the more food there seemed to be. Pretzel buns and cranberry cheese and walnuts appearing, just when they thought they'd tasted everything.
Sarah Addison Allen (First Frost (Waverley Family, #2))
I still think his novels rather boring.” Roy smiled indulgently. “Doesn’t it make you slightly uneasy to think that you disagree with everyone whose opinion matters?” “Not particularly. I’ve been writing for thirty-five years now, and you can’t think how many geniuses I’ve seen acclaimed, enjoy their hour or two of glory, and vanish into obscurity. I wonder what’s happened to them. Are they dead, are they shut up in madhouses, are they hidden away in offices? I wonder if they furtively lend their books to the doctor and the maiden lady in some obscure village. I wonder if they are still great men in some Italian pension.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
I did not of course realize it then, but I know now that there was a disarming frankness in her manner that put one at one’s ease. She talked with a kind of eagerness, like a child bubbling over with the zest of life, and her eyes were lit all the time by her engaging smile. I did not know why I liked it. I should say it was a little sly, if slyness were not a displeasing quality; it was too innocent to be sly. It was mischievous rather, like that of a child who has done something that he thinks funny, but is quite well aware that you will think rather naughty; he knows all the same that you won’t be really cross and if you don’t find out about it quickly he’ll come and tell you himself. But of course then I only knew that her smile made me feel at home.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
he said the men in the colliers that run up to Newcastle and the fishermen and farm hands don’t behave like ladies and gentlemen and don’t talk like them.” “But why write about people of that character?” said my uncle. “That’s what I say,” said Mrs. Hayforth. “We all know that there are coarse and wicked and vicious people in the world, but I don’t see what good it does to write about them.” “I’m not defending him,” said Mr. Galloway. “I’m only telling you what explanation he gives himself. And then of course he brought up Dickens.” “Dickens is quite different,” said my uncle. “I don’t see how anyone can object to the Pickwick Papers.” “I suppose it’s a matter of taste,” said my aunt. “I always found Dickens very coarse. I don’t want to read about people who drop their aitches.
W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)
Dinner began at five and went on until seven forty. It was a meal worthy of the age, the house, and the season. Pea soup to begin, followed by a roast swan with sweet sauce, giblets, mutton steaks, a partridge pie, and four snipe. The second course was a plum pudding with brandy sauce, tarts, mince pies, custards, and cakes, all washed down with port wine and claret and Madeira and home-brewed ale. Ross felt that there was only one thing missing: Charles.
Winston Graham (Ross Poldark (Poldark, #1))
Near the door towered a brightly painted clock with jewelled pendulums. But instead of hours, it seemed to have names of food and drink. Things like Dumplings & Meat, Fish Stew, Mystery Stew, Toast and Tea, Porridge, Ale, Beer, Mead, Wine, Cider, Honey Pie, Brambleberry Crisp, Forest Cakes.
Stephanie Garber (The Ballad of Never After (Once Upon a Broken Heart, #2))
And raspberry jam and apple-tart,” said Bifur. “And mince-pies and cheese,” said Bofur. “And pork-pie and salad,” said Bombur. “And more cakes—and ale—and coffee, if you don’t mind,” called the other dwarves through the door. “Put on a few eggs, there’s a good fellow!” Gandalf called after him, as the hobbit stumped off to the pantries. “And just bring out the cold chicken and pickles!
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit)
Gentlemen,” said Earl Lavender, with perfect complacence, “it becomes you to make a charge of madness against me. I told my friend Lord Brumm a little ago that you have no minds, and I am convinced of it. As you are possibly unaware of the fact, I may as well explain to you how you have arrived at this not altogether unenviable condition. In your youth, I judge from the contour of your heads that you thought and imagined as much as the average young man; but since the strongest convictions you ever entertained were that money makes the mare to go, and that cakes and ale are good, you gradually ceased to think until your minds stopped working altogether, and as your brains grew atrophied your livers increased in power. Now, I suppose, you have digestive apparatuses unmatched in proficiency, while your heads, instead of blossoming like an evergreen in a bowpot, have changed into cinerary urns, containing the ashes of your thought and fancy, and rudely carved with half-intelligible hieroglyphics concerning religion and morality, and copy-book mottoes for the conduct of life. You are perfect types; I recognize that, and would not have you other than you are. I merely wish to let you know that I understand you thoroughly, and to give you the means when you come to die of consoling yourselves with the reflection that you were understood and pardoned by at least one fellow-creature. Most men I have been told die miserable because they think everybody has misunderstood them. Rejoice, therefore, for that lot cannot now be yours.
John Davidson
and at as after an add act adjective answer ask am animal ant ax Africa Medial that can had back last has than man hand plant began stand black happen fast apple /a/ LONG A, OPEN SYLLABLE RULE Initial able acre agent apron Asia apex April Medial paper lady baby radio crazy labor lazy flavor tomato navy station basic label equator relation vapor enable volcano vibration basis hazy potato ladle vacation tablecloth table /a/ LONG A, FINAL E RULE Initial ate age ache ale ape ace Medial make made face same came state late tale place name wave space gave base plane game shape baseball spaceship racetrack shapeless cake /a/ LONG A, AI DIGRAPH Initial aim aid ailment ail Medial rain train wait tail chain jail mail pain sail strait afraid brain claim detail explain fail gain main obtain paid remain wait plain laid faint grain rail nail See also List 7, Suggested Phonics Teaching Order; List 8, Phonics Research Basis. // LONG A, AY DIGRAPH Medial always mayor layer maybe gayly haystack wayside payment rayon jaywalk player daylight Final day say away play may today pay gray bay stay birthday highway repay anyway way pray lay gay hay crayon
Edward B. Fry (The Reading Teacher's Book Of Lists (J-B Ed: Book of Lists 67))
For days wagons had been arriving from all directions, loaded with sacks, crocks and crates, tubs of pickled fish; racks dangling with sausages, hams and bacon; barrels of oil, wine, cider and ale; baskets laden with onions, turnips, cabbages, leeks; also parcels of ramp, parsley, sweet herbs and cress. Day and night the kitchens were active, with the stoves never allowed to go cold. In the service yard four ovens, constructed for the occasion, produced crusty loaves, saffron buns, fruit tarts; also sweet-cakes flavoured with currants, anise, honey and nuts, or even cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. One of the ovens produced only pies and pasties, stuffed with beef and leeks, or spiced hare seethed in wine, or pork and onions, or pike with fennel, or carp in a swelter of dill, butter and mushrooms, or mutton with barley and thyme.
Jack Vance (The Complete Lyonesse (Lyonesse, #1, #2 and #3))
Thus in Twelfth Night the fact that Malvolio is called demon-possessed, and is associated with the devil over and over again, points to his thematic role in the play. Like Satan, he is sick with self-love, falling by the force of his own gravity, as Chesterton said. Of course, Malvolio is a comic devil, not nearly so threatening as Iago or Shylock, but he is a devil nonetheless. And his devilry is manifest particularly in his desire to end the gaiety of Olivia’s house. Here especially the title of the play comes into its own. Twelfth Night is named for the last night of the Christmas season, the final celebration of the Incarnation. It is a night for carnival, for suspension of the serious and structured. Malvolio wants to stop the merriment, and so it is fitting that he is ultimately excluded from it. But more: Malvolio is not only excluded from the comic climax of the play. He is excluded and overcome through trickery, practical joking, mirth. Satan digs a pit for the merry, but Satan falls into the very pit of merriment. And it tortures him forever. In the final analysis, that is the practical import of all that has been said in this little book: the joy of Easter, the joy of resurrection, the joy of trinitarian life does not simply offer an alternative “worldview” to the tragic self-inflation of the ancients. Worked out in the joyful life of the Christian church, deep comedy is the chief weapon of our warfare. For in the joy of the Lord is our strength, and Satan shall be felled with “cakes and ale” and midnight revels.
Peter J. Leithart (Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, & Hope In Western Literature)
Do you like sandwiches?" he asked. "At this point, I think I'd eat anything. Other than rabbit. I'm not excessively fond of rabbit." "Or anything with eyes," he said, charming her by remembering. "I've an appetite for beef, some bread, mustard, and ale." At her look, he smiled. "I have a schoolboy's tastes. It's what I lived on in England. I still crave it from time to time." Hustle's staff must have been prepared for his cravings because within a quarter hour they were seated in his sitting room with a large tray on the table between them. She was dressed in one of his blue dressing gowns and he wore a black patterned one. She tucked her feet beneath her as, one by one, he took the domed lids from a succession of plates, each smelling better than the one before. When he came to the cake, a delicious looking confection filled with nuts and fruit, she glanced up at him. "I want cake," she said. "Before anything healthful or beneficial." "Cake it is, then," he said, cutting a piece and handing it to her. She closed her eyes after the first forkful. The taste was heavenly, light and airy yet filled with nuts and chopped apricots. When she opened her eyes, it was to find him watching her. "I love cake," she said, embarrassed. "I love sweets." "What about rabbit cake?" "Oh, that would pose a problem for me." He smiled and she felt it down to her toes.
Karen Ranney (The Virgin of Clan Sinclair (Clan Sinclair, #3))