Top 35 E.F. Benson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “My dear, it is just busy people that have time for everything.”

— E.F. Benson

2. “There is to my mind something inhuman in senility, something crouching and atavistic; the human qualities seem to drop from old people insensibly day by day. The three of them made me feel uncomfortable, with their gaunt silences, their bent carriage, their evident unfriendliness to me and to one another.”

— E.F. Benson

3. “Vermouth always makes me brilliant unless it makes me idiotic.”

— E.F. Benson

4. “Vermouth always makes me brilliant unless it makes me idiotic, but we’ll hope for the best.”

— E.F. Benson

5. “It took all my philosophy, all the religion I had been taught, all my courage, not to collapse in a paroxysm of fright.”

— E.F. Benson

6. “My candle was a little tongue of light in its vastness, that failed to pierce the opposite end of the room, and left an ocean of mystery and suggestion beyond its island of light.”

— E.F. Benson

7. “There’s many things in this world that will depress you, and make you good for nothing, if you take them seriously, and that cheer you up if you don’t.”

— E.F. Benson

8. “For it is a most extraordinary, though common, phenomenon to find that perfectly virtuous and upright people often like to be thought just a little wicked, whereas bad people are totally indifferent for the most part as to whether or not anyone thinks them good or not.”

— E.F. Benson

9. “These invitations were couched in Chesterfield terms: Mr. Wyse said that he had met a mutual friend just now who had informed him that you were in residence, and had encouraged him to hope that you might give him the pleasure of your company, etc. This was alluring diction: it presented the image of Mr. Wyse stepping briskly home again, quite heartened up by this chance encounter, and no longer the prey to melancholy at the thought that you might not give him the joy.”

— E.F. Benson

10. “I have lived, and never a ghost have I seen as yet.” The old woman sat staring hard into the fire, her pale eyes wide open. “Ay,” she broke in; “and eight-and-twenty years you have lived and never seen the likes of this house, I reckon. There’s a many things to see, when one’s still but eight-and-twenty.” She swayed her head slowly from side to side. “A many things to see and sorrow for.”

— E.F. Benson

11. “He deceived me by telling the truth.”

— E.F. Benson

12. “Miss Elizabeth Mapp might have been forty, and she had taken advantage of this opportunity by being just a year or two older.”

— E.F. Benson

13. “An idea so luminous flashed across her brain that she almost thought the room had leaped into light.”

— E.F. Benson

14. “When one is happy there is no time to be fatigued; being happy engrosses the whole attention.”

— E.F. Benson

15. “It is absurd and ridiculous to want to remain as one was. Indeed, not to change shows that one has a nature incapable of development. It implies a sort of moral torpor, an atrophy of one’s nature not to get older as one gets older. And one of the biggest, and perhaps best effects of age is to give one tolerance, to make one realize that it takes all sorts to make a world.” He.”

— E.F. Benson

16. “Go home, Johann – Walpurgis-nacht doesn’t concern Englishmen.”

— E.F. Benson

17. “No proper person fusses about death; that’s a train which we are all sure to catch.”

— E.F. Benson

18. “There was something so weird and uncanny about the whole thing that it gave me a turn and made me feel quite faint. I began to wish, for the first time, that I had taken Johann’s advice. Here a thought struck me, which came under almost mysterious circumstances and with a terrible shock.”

— E.F. Benson

19. “Philosophers have argued about the strongest emotion known to man. Some say ‘love’, others ‘hate’, others ‘fear’. I am disposed to put ‘curiosity’ on a level, at least, with these august sensations, just mere simple inquisitiveness.”

— E.F. Benson

20. “The hours of the morning between breakfast and lunch were the time which the inhabitants of Riseholme chiefly devoted to spying on each other.”

— E.F. Benson

21. “Emotionally, I have no picture-book illustrated with memories of my first five years, but externally, I have impressions that possess a haunting vividness comparable only to the texture of dreams, when dreams are tumultuously alive.”

— E.F. Benson

22. “He exhibited three portraits, each a masterpiece, which killed every picture within range.”

— E.F. Benson

23. “No trumps. Not a trump. Not any sort of Trump. There!”

— E.F. Benson

24. “He told himself that he was not drunk at all, but that he had taken an unusual quantity of whisky, which seemed to produce much the same effect as intoxication.”

— E.F. Benson

25. “No one is ever bored unless they are comfortable. That’s the great principle. There isn’t time for it. You cannot be bored and something else at the same time. Being comfortable doesn’t count; that’s our normal condition. But you needn’t be uncomfortable in order to be bored. It’s very comfortable sitting here with you, and I’m not the least bored. I should poison myself if I were bored: I can’t think why you don’t.”

— E.F. Benson

26. “Bits of exultation kept peeping out, and Lucia kept poking them back.”

— E.F. Benson

27. “Even with that, however, the brooding expectation of the vigil weighed heavily upon me. It was after midnight that the candle in the alcove suddenly went out, and the black shadow sprang back to its place there. I did not see the candle go out; I simply turned and saw that the darkness was there, as one might start and see the unexpected presence of a stranger.”

— E.F. Benson

28. “Conversation was a thing that made time pass, not a way of passing the time.”

— E.F. Benson

29. “We are most of us so accustomed to see people behave, and to behave ourselves, in a manner not quite natural, that to see anyone who never does so, is in itself calculated to make one rather nervous.”

— E.F. Benson

30. “If you come to think of it, the one thing which the human mind cannot grasp is the finite, not the infinite, the temporary, not the eternal.”

— E.F. Benson

31. “I don’t see how the baby is the result of gambling,” said Georgie. “Unless he bet he wouldn’t have one.”

— E.F. Benson

32. “Puffin made a noise that sounded rather like “Fudge!”

— E.F. Benson

33. “Poets of all ages and of all denominations are unanimous in assuring us that there was once a period on this grey earth known as the Golden Age. These irresponsible hards describe it in terms of the vaguest, most poetic splendour, and, apart from the fact, upon which they are all agreed, that the weather was always perfectly charming, we have to reconstruct its characteristics in the main for ourselves.”

— E.F. Benson

34. “We really must make a compromise,” thought Miss Mapp, meaning that everybody must come round to her way of thinking, “or our dear little cosy bridge evenings won’t be possible.”

— E.F. Benson

35. “And all the time, if she had only known it, the stars were fighting not against her but for her.”

— E.F. Benson

36. “Georgie knew it was useless to protest when Lucia got that loud, inspired, gabbling ring in her voice; she would cut through any opposition, as a steam saw buzzes through the most solid oak board till, amid a fountain of flying sawdust, it has sliced its way.”

— E.F. Benson

37. “I tried to argue with him, but it was difficult to argue with a man when I did not know his language. The advantage certainly rested with him, for although he began to speak in English, of a very crude and broken kind, he always got excited and broke into his native tongue – and every time he did so, he looked at his watch.”

— E.F. Benson