H H Munro Quotes

He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.

The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.

Mother, may I go and maffick, Tear around and hinder traffic?

And the vagueness of his alarm added to its terrors; when once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless.

Do one thing for me, Sredni Vashtar.

Miles away, down through an opening in the hills, he could catch glimpses of a road where motor-cars sometimes passed, and yet here, so removed from the arteries of the latest civilization, was a bat-haunted old homestead, where something unmistakably like witchcraft seemed to hold a very practical sway.

There was something alike terrifying and piteous in the spectacle of these frail old morsels of humanity consecrating their last flickering energies to the task of making each other wretched. Hatred seemed to be the one faculty which had survived in undiminished vigor where all else was dropping into ordered and symmetrical decay.

It was the happiest Christmas Eve he had ever spent. To quote his own words, he had a rotten Christmas.

He was, in the words of H. H. Munro, a man whose looks made it possible for women to forgive any other trifling inadequacies.

Horror fiction seems to spawn more dumbass 'rules' than any other kind of writing, and one of the dumbest is the assumed 'requirement' of a twist ending, going all the way back to H.H. Munro. This story is also the result of a long rumination on how stories are sometimes scuttled or diminished by succumbing to such 'rules'.

For Arthur Munroe was dead. And on what remained of his chewed and gouged head there was no longer a face.

H. H. Munro. Also known as Saki. The story is called ‘The Open Window.’ Look it up. When it comes to the art of creating bullshit on the spur of the moment, it’s very instructive.

Out through that window, three years ago to a day, her husband and her two young brothers went off for their day's shooting. They never came back. In crossing the moor to their favourite snipe-shooting ground they were all three engulfed in a treacherous piece of bog. It had been that dreadful wet summer, you know, and places that were safe in other years gave way suddenly without warning. Their bodies were never recovered. That was the dreadful part of it." Here the child's voice lost its self-possessed note and became falteringly human. "Poor aunt always thinks that they will come back some day, they and the little brown spaniel that was lost with them, and walk in at that window just as they used to do. That is why the window is kept open every evening till it is quite dusk. Poor dear aunt, she has often told me how they went out, her husband with his white waterproof coat over his arm, and Ronnie, her youngest brother, singing 'Bertie, why do you bound?' as he always did to tease her, because she said it got on her nerves. Do you know, sometimes on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they will all walk in through that window -

You know , most people wouldn’t default to ‘ I’m gay ’ as a way to stop their parents hassling them .

There are more ways of killing a cat than by choking it with cream," he quoted, "but I'm not sure," he added, "that it's not the best way.

How many unique English tweets are possible? How long would it take for the population of the world to read them all out loud? —Eric H,

There was a fellow I stayed with once in Warwickshire who farmed his own land, but was otherwise quite steady.  Should never have suspected him of having a soul, yet not very long afterwards he eloped with a lion-tamer's widow and set up as a golf-instructor somewhere on the Persian Gulf; dreadfully immoral, of course, because he was only an indifferent player, but still, it showed imagination.  His wife was really to be pitied, because he had been the only person in the house who understood how to manage the cook's temper, and now she has to put "D.V." on her dinner invitations. 

Seriously , it’s fine . I realised long ago that those that care don’t matter , and those that matter don’t care . I know that you don’t care that I’m gay , and at the moment , you’re the only one that matters .

The absolute kick in the flaps about the whole thing was that when Hannah was straight , she was utterly comfortable about telling everyone that she was gay . Apparently , actual gay was a whole different ball of fuck.

Mrs. De Ropp was Conradin's cousin and guardian, and in his eyes she represented those three-fifths of the world that are necessary and disagreeable and real; the other two-fifths, in perpetual antagonism to the foregoing, were summed up in himself and his imagination. One of these days Conradin supposed he would succumb to the mastering pressure of wearisome necessary things--such as illnesses and coddling restrictions and drawn-out dullness. Without his imagination, which was rampant under the spur of loneliness, he would have succumbed long ago.

Mrs. De Ropp would never, in her honestest moments, have confessed to herself that she disliked Conradin, though she might have been dimly aware that thwarting him "for his good" was a duty which she did not find particularly irksome. Conradin hated her with a desperate sincerity which he was perfectly able to mask. Such few pleasures as he could contrive for himself gained an added relish from the likelihood that they would be displeasing to his guardian, and from the realm of his imagination she was locked out--an unclean thing, which should find no entrance.

Do one thing for me, Sredni Vashtar." The thing was not specified. As Sredni Vashtar was a god he must be supposed to know. And choking back a sob as he looked at that other empty corner, Conradin went back to the world he so hated.

IT was autumn in London, that blessed season between  the harshness of winter and the insincerities of summer;  a trustful season when one buys bulbs and sees to the  registration of one's vote, believing perpetually in  spring and a change of Government.

This is not like other bookshops.’ He leaned forward and whispered. ‘Every word in that book is true. Every word on every page in every book in my shop is true.

Oh, dear, no," said Lady Carlotta; "not at all tiresome - for me.

They(women) go shopping as bees go flower visiting.