Guinea Money Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Guinea Money. Here they are! All 38 of them:

No guinea of earned money should go to rebuilding the college on the old plan just as certainly none could be spent upon building a college upon a new plan: therefore the guinea should be earmarked "Rags. Petrol. Matches." And this note should be attached to it. "Take this guinea and with it burn the college to the ground. Set fire to the old hypocrisies. Let the light of the burning building scare the nightingales and incarnadine the willows. And let the daughters of educated men dance round the fire and heap armful upon armful of dead leaves upon the flames. And let their mothers lean from the upper windows and cry, "Let it blaze! Let it blaze! For we have done with this 'education!
Virginia Woolf (Three Guineas)
There's a very generous donation in the parish's future if you make this fast. Ten minutes, at the most." Frowning, the man fumbled open his liturgy. "There's an established rite, Your Grace. Marriage must be entered into with solemnity and consideration. I don't know that I can rush--" "Ten minutes. One thousand guineas." The liturgy snapped closed. "Then again, what do a few extra minutes signify to an eternal God?" He beckoned Amelia with a fluttering, papery hand. "Make haste, child. You're about to be married.
Tessa Dare (One Dance with a Duke (Stud Club, #1))
The questions that we have to ask and to answer about that procession during this moment of transition are so important that they may well change the lives of men and women forever. For we have to ask ourselves, here and now, do we wish to join that procession, or don't we? On what terms shall we join that procession? Above all, where is it leading us, the procession of educated men?...Let us never cease from thinking--what is this "civilisation" in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them? Where in short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men?
Virginia Woolf (Three Guineas)
To know nothing, or little, is in the nature of some husbands. To hide, in the nature of how many women? Oh, ladies! how many of you have surreptitious milliners' bills? How many of you have gowns and bracelets which you daren't show, or which you wear trembling?--trembling, and coaxing with smiles the husband by your side, who does not know the new velvet gown from the old one, or the new bracelet from last year's, or has any notion that the ragged-looking yellow lace scarf cost forty guineas and that Madame Bobinot is writing dunning letters every week for the money!
William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair)
(4) Modern capitalism is, and the ancient Roman economy was not, organized in a way that made it potentially rewarding to invest capital in technological development. (5) The strong individualism of U.S. society allows successful inventors to keep earnings for themselves, whereas strong family ties in New Guinea ensure that someone who begins to earn money will be joined by a dozen relatives expecting to move in and be fed and supported.
Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth. I feel that a man may be happy in this world. And I know that this world is a world of imagination and vision. I see every thing I paint in this world, but everybody does not see alike. To the eyes of a miser a guinea is far more beautiful than the Sun, and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees. […] You certainly mistake, when you say that the visions of fancy are not to be found in this world. To me this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination, and I feel flattered when I am told so.
William Blake (The Portable Blake)
My parents were anthropologists. They studied indigenous people here in New Guinea, and I know exactly what you’re referring to. People know of poverty because they have learned about personal possessions and money. People know shame because they were shown clothing. They live in fear because they were given modern weapons
Stan C. Smith (Diffusion (Diffusion, #1))
A heap of shining guineas was lying there. Mrs Brandy picked up one of the coins and examined it. It was as though she held a ball of soft yellow light with a coin at the bottom of it.
Susanna Clarke (Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell)
Thus, if you teach a poor young man to shave himself, and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas. The money may be soon spent, the regret only remaining of having foolishly consumed it; but in the other case, he escapes the frequent vexation of waiting for barbers, and of their sometimes dirty fingers, offensive breaths, and dull razors; he shaves when most convenient to him, and enjoys daily the pleasure of its being done with a good instrument.
Benjamin Franklin (Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Illustrated))
Thus, if you teach a poor young man to shave himself, and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas. The money may be soon spent, the regret only remaining of having foolishly consumed it; but in the other case, he escapes the frequent vexation of waiting for barbers, and of their sometimes dirty fingers, offensive breaths, and dull razors; he shaves when most convenient to him, and enjoys daily the pleasure of its being done with a good instrument. With
Benjamin Franklin (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin)
The strong individualism of U.S. society allows successful inventors to keep earnings for themselves, whereas strong family ties in New Guinea ensure that someone who begins to earn money will be joined by a dozen relatives expecting to move in and be fed and supported.
Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
The Government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war. ... Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first LENSMAN space opera. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of things they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proved how on target our approach was.' 'Oh my God... said Jonathan, his mouth stalling the open position. 'Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. We pulled a 40 share. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low voltage shocks. Jesus, Jonathan, can you *see* what we've accomplished? In something under half a decade we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. They buy what we tell them to buy. Music, movies, whole lifestyles. And they hate who we tell them to. ... It's simple to make our audiences slaver for blood; that past hasn't changed since the days of the Colosseum. We've conditioned a whole population to live on the rim of Apocalypse and love it. They want to kill the enemy, tear his heart out, go to war so their gas bills will go down! They're all primed for just that sort of denouemment, ti satisfy their need for linear storytelling in the fictions that have become their lives! The system perpetuates itself. Our own guinea pigs pay us money to keep the mechanisms grinding away. If you don't believe that, just check out last year's big hit movies... then try to tell me the target demographic audience isn't waiting for marching orders. ("Incident On A Rainy Night In Beverly Hills")
David J. Schow (Seeing Red)
That will help us to understand how the love of accumulating money grows an absorbing passion in men whose imaginations, even in the very beginning of their hoard, showed them no purpose beyond it. Marner wanted the heaps of ten to grow into a square, and then into a larger square; and every added guinea, while it was itself a satisfaction, bred a new desire
George Eliot (Complete Works of George Eliot)
Obstetricians also doubted the female intellectual capacity to grasp the anatomy and physiology of childbirth, and suggested that they could not therefore be trained. But the root fear was – guess what? – you’ve got it, but no prizes for quickness: money. Most doctors charged a routine one guinea for a delivery. The word got around that trained midwives would undercut them by delivering babies for half a guinea! The knives were out.
Jennifer Worth (Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times (The Midwife Trilogy #1))
Let me tell you one story to illustrate what I mean. I remember a woman who was a spiritist, and even a medium, a paid medium employed by a spiritist society. She used to go every Sunday evening to a spiritist meeting and was paid three guineas for acting as a medium. This was during the thirties, and that was quite a large sum of money for a lower middle-class woman. She was ill one Sunday and could not go to keep her appointment. She was sitting in her house and she saw people passing by on their way to the church where I happened to be ministering in South Wales. Something made her feel a desire to know what those people had, and so she decided to go to the service, and did. She came ever afterwards until she died, and became a very fine Christian. One day I asked her what she had felt on that first visit, and this is what she said to me; and this is the point I am illustrating. She said, 'The moment I entered your chapel and sat down on a seat amongst the people I was conscious of a power. I was conscious of the same sort of power as I was accustomed to in our spiritist meetings, but there was one big difference; I had a feeling that the power in your chapel was a clean power.' The point I am making is simply this, that she was aware of a power. This is this mysterious element. It is the presence of the Spirit in the heart of God's children, God's people, and an outsider becomes aware of this. This is something you can never get if you just sit and read a book on your own. The Spirit can use a book, I know, but because of the very constitution of man's nature -our gregarious character, and the way in which we lean on one another, and are helped by one another even unconsciously- this is a most important factor. That is so in a natural sense, but when the Spirit is present, it is still more so. I am not advocating a mob or a mass psychology which I regard as extremely dangerous, particularly when it is worked up. All I am contending for is that when you enter a church, a society, a company of God' s people, there is a factor which immediately comes into operation, which is reinforced still more by the preacher expounding the Word in the pulpit; and that is why preaching can never be replaced by either reading or by watching television or anyone of these other activities.
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day. Thus, if you teach a poor young man to shave himself and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas. The money may be soon spent, the regret only remaining of having foolishly consumed it; but in the other case, he escapes the frequent vexation of waiting for barbers,
Benjamin Franklin (Franklin's Autobiography)
You have to imagine what it was like to be on the receiving end of vicious antagonism: sneering, contempt, ridicule, slights about one’s intelligence, integrity and motives. In those days, women even ran the risk of dismissal for their opinions. And this treatment came from other women, as well as men. In fact, “in-fighting” between various schools of nurses who had some sort of training in midwifery was particularly nasty. One eminent lady – the matron of St Bartholomew’s Hospital – branded the aspiring midwives as “anachronisms, who would in the future be regarded as historical curiosities”. The medical opposition seems to have arisen mainly from the fact that “women are striving to interfere too much in every department of life”.* Obstetricians also doubted the female intellectual capacity to grasp the anatomy and physiology of childbirth, and suggested that they could not therefore be trained. But the root fear was – guess what? – you’ve got it, but no prizes for quickness: money. Most doctors charged a routine one guinea for a delivery. The word got around that trained midwives would undercut them by delivering babies for half a guinea! The knives were out.
Jennifer Worth (Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times (The Midwife Trilogy #1))
He had taken up some bricks in his floor underneath his loom, and here he had made a hole in which he set the iron pot that contained his guineas and silver coins, covering the bricks with sand whenever he replaced them. Not that the idea of being robbed presented itself often or strongly to his mind: hoarding was common in country districts in those days; there were old labourers in the parish of Raveloe who were known to have their savings by them, probably inside their flock-beds; but their rustic neighbours, though not all of them as honest as their ancestors in the days of King Alfred, had not imaginations bold enough to lay a plan of burglary. How could they have spent the money in their own village without betraying themselves? They would be obliged to “run away” — a course as dark and dubious as a balloon journey.
George Eliot (Complete Works of George Eliot)
Although his intimacy with Stephen Maturin did not allow him to ask questions that might be judged impertinent, it was of such a rare kind that he could ask for money without the least hesitation. "Have you any money, Stephen?" he said, the Marine having vanished in the trees. "How I hope you have. I shall have to borrow the Marine's guinea from you, and a great deal more besides, if his message is what I dearly trust. My half-pay is not due until the month after next, and we are living on credit." "Money, is it?" said Stephen, who had been thinking about lemurs. There were lemurs in Madagascar: might there not be lemurs on Reunion? Lemurs concealed among the forests and the mountains of the interior? "Money? Oh, yes, I have money galore." He felt in his pockets. "The question is, where is it?" He felt again, patted his bosom, and brought out a couple of greasy two pound notes on a country bank. "That is not it," he muttered, going through his pockets again. "Yet I was sure--was it in my other coat? did I perhaps leave it in London?--you are growing old, Maturin--ah, you dog, there you are!" he cried triumphantly, returning to the first pocket and drawing forth a neat roll, tied with tape. "There. I had confused it with my lancet-case. It was Mrs Broad of the Grapes that did it up, finding it in a Bank of England wrapper that I had--that I had neglected. A most ingenious way of carrying money, calculated to deceive the pick-pocket. I hope it will suffice." "How much is it?" asked Jack. "Sixty or seventy pound, I dare say." "But, Stephen, the top note is a fifty, and so is the next. I do not believe you ever counted them." "Well, never mind, never mind," said Stephen testily. "I meant a hundred and sixty. Indeed, I said as much, only you did not attend.
Patrick O'Brian (The Mauritius Command: 4 (Aubrey-Maturin))
Human felicity is produc'd not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day. Thus, if you teach a poor young man to shave himself, and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas. The money may be soon spent, the regret only remaining of having foolishly consumed it; but in the other case, he escapes the frequent vexation of waiting for barbers, and of their sometimes dirty fingers, offensive breaths, and dull razors; he shaves when most convenient to him, and enjoys daily the pleasure of its being done with a good instrument. With these sentiments I have hazarded the few preceding pages, hoping they may afford hints which some time or other may be useful to a city I love, having lived many years in it very happily, and perhaps to some of our towns in America.
Benjamin Franklin (The Complete Harvard Classics - ALL 71 Volumes: The Five Foot Shelf & The Shelf of Fiction: The Famous Anthology of the Greatest Works of World Literature)
Did you bring money with you, or shall we play for markers?" She flipped the stack of cards to the table with a professional twist of her wrist. "I don't play for less than a guinea a hand." His lips twitched. "The question is not if I have money. The question is, do you?" "I don't need funds, as I don't plan on losing," she said, her gaze mocking. For a moment, he thought he'd heard her incorrectly. Slowly, he said, "I beg your pardon, but are you saying you could beat me at a game of chance?" A dismissive smile rested on her lips. "Please, Dougal, let's speak frankly," she drawled softly. "Naturally, I expect to win; I was taught by a master." Dougal was entranced. He'd been challenged to many things before, but no one had so blatantly dismissed his chances of winning. "A giunea a hand?" "At least." "I didn't realize I'd need a note from my banker, or I'd have brought one with me." Her eyes sparkled with pure mischief, which inflamed him more. "If you've no money with you, then perhaps there are other things we can play for." The words hung in the room, as thick as the smoke that seeped from the fireplace. Like a blinding bolt of light from a storm-black sky, everything fell into place. This was why she and her minions had worked so hard to convince him that the house was worthless. If he thought it of low value, he'd be eager to wager the deed. Of all the devious plots! Yet Dougal found himself fighting a grin. He'd been feted and petted, fawned upon and sought out, but until now, no one had gone to such lengths to fleece him. Dugal couldn't look away from Sophia. He knew his own worth; women had paid attention to him for so long that he took it for granted. He'd dallied and toyed, taken and enjoyed. But never, in all of his years, had he so desired any woman as he did this one. The irony of it was that she desired him,too-but only for the contents of his pocket. Dougal didn't know whether to laugh or fume. He should be insulted, but instead he found himself watching her with new appreciation.
Karen Hawkins (To Catch a Highlander (MacLean Curse, #3))
In the first place, the African family is built around a common life. For many people, money has a secondary place. My family was poor, but we were still happy and close-knit. In Guinea, the family has remained the primordial cell of society, the place where we learn to be attentive to others and to serve them unostentatiously.
Robert Sarah (God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith)
Let me tell you one story to illustrate what I mean. I remember a woman who was a spiritist, and even a medium, a paid medium employed by a spiritist society. She used to go every Sunday evening to a spiritist meeting and was paid three guineas for acting as a medium. Thi s was during the thirties, and that was quite a large sum of money for a lower middle-class woman. She was ill one Sunday and could not go to keep her appointment. She was sitting in her house and she saw people passing by on their way to the church where I happened to be ministering in South Wales. Something made her feel a desire to know what those people had, and so she decided to go to the service, and did 80. She came ever afterwards until she died, and became a very fine Christian. One day I asked her what she had felt on that first visit, and this is what she said to me; and this is the point I am illustrating. She said, 'The moment I entered your chapel and sat down on a seat amongst the people I was conscious of a power. I was conscious of the same sort of power as I was accustomed to in our spiritist meetings, but there was one big difference; I had a feeling that the power in your chapel was a clean power.' The point I am making is simply this, tha t she was aware of a power. Thi s is this mysterious element. I t is the presence of the Spirit in the heart of God's children, God's people, and an outsider becomes aware of this. Thi s is something you can never get if you jus t sit and read a book on your own. The Spirit can use a book, I know, but because of the very constitution of man' s na tur e -our gregarious character, and the way in which we lean on one another, and are helped by one another even uncons c ious ly- thi s is a most important factor. Tha t is so in a natural sense, but when the Spirit is present, it is still more so. I am not advocating a mob or a mass psychology which I regard as extremely dangerous, particularly when it is worked up. All I am contending for is tha t when you enter a church, a society, a company of God' s people, there is a factor which immediately comes into operation, which is reinforced still more by the preacher expounding the Word in the pulpit; and tha t is why preaching can never be replaced by either reading or by watching television or anyone of these other activities. 44
Anonymous
It is not just rich nations that the United States lags behind either. According to the International Labor Organization, it is one of only two countries out of 185, the other being New Guinea, that does not provide some form of aid to new parents.
Annie Lowrey (Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World)
In the 1980s, Australia had a few home-grown immunisation sceptics, although the great majority of parents immunised their children. In 1996, a film-maker made a supposedly scientific documentary for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). She interviewed people who were both pro- and anti-immunisation in equal numbers, ‘for balance’. She was pregnant with her first child, and concluded the documentary by saying that she had not yet decided whether or not to get her baby immunised. I was one of the doctors interviewed. When the documentary was shown in Australia it generated considerable debate and controversy. Two weeks later I was in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, and gave a presentation to the hospital about immunisation. A number of the audience told me they recognised me from the documentary, which had been shown that week on PNG television. They were puzzled as to why anyone would make such a film. Their wards were filled with children with severe tuberculosis, newborns dying from tetanus, and babies with severe rotavirus gastroenteritis, all preventable by immunisation. On their streets were people crippled forever by poliomyelitis. But Papua New Guinea did not have the money or the public health infrastructure to deliver vaccines effectively to its population. Papua New Guineans knew vaccines could prevent the devastating diseases they saw every day, and could not understand why anyone in Australia would dream of not immunising their child. Immunisation scepticism is very much a first-world problem.
David Isaacs (Defeating the Ministers of Death: The compelling story of vaccination, one of medicine's greatest triumphs)
Gracie might, or might not, be a dog. The smart money was now on guinea pig, with hedgehog a close second.
Louise Penny (A World of Curiosities (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #18))
...Ken explained to me why everybody over here hates the new money. It has to do with the Englishman's need to be different. The decimal system is much simpler than the old h'penny-tuppenny-guinea-tenner-tanner system, but the old money was theirs; no other country had it and nobody else could understand it. He said they hate entering the Common Market for the same reason. They don't want to be part-of-Europe, they want to be separate, different, set apart. He illustrated this by quoting an old headline which has become a cliché joke over here. During a spell of bad weather when the whole island was enveloped in fog, one English newspaper headline read: FOG ISOLATES CONTINENT.
Helene Hanff (84, Charing Cross Road)
He gave a puzzled look. ‘Doesn’t the Lord’s Prayer mention just that? “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” The answer is staring them in the face, but we’ve ensured they ignore and deride it – and no, pay no heed to the English Standard Version, we’ve already begun to corrupt God’s word in the ESV, amongst others. We don’t just try to pervert Catholics, God, no, all Christians are fair game – the fools. All religions, for that matter. We’ve had particular fun demonising Jews and Muslims, and some entire countries have been cast into madness by pornography alone. Papua, New Guinea, is a particularly pleasing example. But I digress. Did you know there’s a whole raft of trauma release therapies that work amazingly well at curing virtually all mental disorders and addictions? They can even reverse some diseases and prevent the manifestation of others. It’s not very well known, but that’s because we can’t make money out of healthy people, we need them sick and disorientated and thinking they need drugs to cure themselves, when the cure is within them all along!
Robert Storey (The Lost Prophet (Ancient Origins #6))
Perhaps nothing better typifies the strange and often accidental nature of chemical science in its early days than a discovery made by a German named Hennig Brand in 1675. Brand became convinced that gold could somehow be distilled from human urine. (The similarity of color seems to have been a factor in his conclusion.) He assembled fifty buckets of human urine, which he kept for months in his cellar. By various recondite processes, he converted the urine first into a noxious paste and then into a translucent waxy substance. None of it yielded gold, of course, but a strange and interesting thing did happen. After a time, the substance began to glow. Moreover, when exposed to air, it often spontaneously burst into flame. The commercial potential for the stuff-which soon became known as phosphorus, from Greek and Latin roots meaning "light bearing"—was not lost on eager businesspeople, but the difficulties of manufacture made it too costly to exploit. An ounce of phosphorus retailed for six guineas—perhaps five hundred dollars in todays money-or more than gold. At first soldiers were called on to provide the raw material, but such an arrangement was hardly conducive to industrial-scale production. In the 1750s a Swedish chemist named Karl (or Carl) Scheele devised a way to manufacture phosphorus in bulk without the slop or smell of urine. It was largely because of this mastery of phosphorus that Sweden became, and remains, a leading producer of matches.
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
Two things I don’t like, outmarsh. One, people who think they’re clever when they’re not, and two, you. If you say one more thing that isn’t the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, I’m going to tell the Preventives you used the money you stole to run guineas to France.
K.J. Charles (The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen (The Doomsday Books, #1))
You said—” Lionel began. “Our money—!” Henry protested. “Shove your guineas up your arse,” Joss told them both.
K.J. Charles (The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen (The Doomsday Books, #1))
All the golden guineas had gone now and we only had the little I earned as a model. With this we had to pay for food, light and heat, and laundry and of course rent. Sometimes we were several weeks behind and the landlady would ask us for money each time we went in or out of the house. I would hear her talking about us to the other people who lived on the floor below and felt dreadfully ashamed. Charles did not mind. He just said she was a silly old bitch. As soon as Charles started to paint he forgot about the cold and money worries. That is how artists should be, but I was only a commercial artist, so I went on worrying.
Barbara Comyns (Our Spoons Came from Woolworths)
Human felicity is produc'd not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day. Thus, if you teach a poor young man to shave himself, and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas. The money may be soon spent, the regret only remaining of having foolishly consumed it; but in the other case, he escapes the frequent vexation of waiting for barbers, and of their sometimes dirty fingers, offensive breaths, and dull razors; he shaves when most convenient to him, and enjoys daily the pleasure of its being done with a good instrument.
Charles William Eliot (The Complete Harvard Classics - ALL 71 Volumes: The Five Foot Shelf & The Shelf of Fiction: The Famous Anthology of the Greatest Works of World Literature)
The lawyer’s stakes at the table turned out to be not even colonial notes of the usual baffling variability, but certificates drawable upon a tobacco warehouse in Virginia, and Smith presented one without much hope, the first time he tried their use as payment. But it was accepted without demur, at fifty-five per centum of face, New-York’s merchants seeming all to maintain within themselves a register of values for every conceivable money-substitute they might encounter. Wampum, tobacco bales, rum by the gallon: it was all money, in a world without money. Between the tobacco tickets and his own pointedly-returned guineas, Smith calculated he now possessed enough to reach Christmas in relative ease – if he could avoid being knocked on the head for spoiling De Lancey’s game against the Governor, or offending in some other role pressed upon him, or falling victim to a misadventure entirely unsuspected.
Francis Spufford (Golden Hill)
They say that democracy cannot be adopted; it has to be adapted to the African way of thinking. What does that mean? That the all-powerful and corrupt political leaders should stay in power? That Teodoro Obiang, the President of Equatorial Guinea, should appropriate all the country’s money for himself, a country with income per capita of more than 20,000 euros thanks to oil but where people suffer hunger and poverty? Or that women should not have any rights?
Fernando Ballano Gonzalo (Ghana: Castles in Africa: English translation: David Griffiths)
The Americans even exacted their revenge for Pearl Harbor in April 1943, when cryptanalysts learned that Admiral Yamamoto, who had planned the deadly attack, was due to make a visit to the island of Bougainville, near New Guinea. American fighters, waiting in ambush, came out of the clouds and sent the admiral down in flames to his death in the jungle below.
Daniel Yergin (The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power)
p2 I'd seen a photo of the actual red and white checked notebook that was Anne [Frank]'s first diary. I longed to own a similar notebook. Stationery was pretty dire back in the late fifties and early sixties. There was no such thing as Paperchase. I walked round and round the stationery counter in Woolworths and spent most of my pocket money on notebooks, but they weren't strong on variety. You could have shiny red sixpenny notebooks, lined inside, with strange maths details about rods and poles and perches on the back. (I never found out what they were!) Then you could have shiny blue sixpenny notebooks. That was your lot. I was enchanted to read in Dodie Smith's novel I Capture The Castle that the heroine, Cassandra, was writing her diary in a similar sixpenny notebook. She eventually progressed to a shilling notebook. My Woolworths rarely stocked such expensive luxuries. Then, two thirds of the way through the book, Cassandra is given a two-guinea red leather manuscript book. I lusted after that fictional notebook for years. I told my mother, Biddy. She rolled her eyes. It could have cost two hundred guineas - both were way out of our league... My dad, Harry, was a civil servant. One of the few perks of his job was that he had an unlimited illegal supply of notepads watermarked SO - Stationery Office. I'd drawn on these pads for years, I'd scribbled stories, I'd written letters. They were serviceable but unexciting: thin cream paper unreliably bound with glue at the top. You couldn't write a journal with these notepads; it would fall apart in days... My spelling wasn't too hot. It still isn't. Thank goodness for the spellcheck on my computer!
Jacqueline Wilson (My Secret Diary)
Hornblower sat in his private sitting-room in the Golden Cross inn. There was a fire burning, and on the table at which he sat there were no fewer than four wax candles lighted. All this luxury — the private sitting-room, the fire, the wax candles — gave Hornblower uneasy delight. He had been poor for so long, he had had to scrape and economize so carefully all his life, that recklessness with money gave him this queer dubious pleasure, this guilty joy. His bill tomorrow would contain an item of at least half a crown for light, and if he had been content with rush dips the charge would not have been more than twopence. The fire would be a shilling, too. And you could trust an innkeeper to make the maximum charges to a guest who obviously could afford them, a Knight of the Bath, with a servant, and a two-horse chariot. Tomorrow’s bill would be nearer two guineas than one, Hornblower touched his breast pocket to reassure himself that his thick wad of one-pound notes was still there. He could afford to spend
C.S. Forester (Commodore Hornblower (Hornblower Saga #9))