Top 120 Jodi Taylor Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”

— Jodi Taylor

2. “Getting things done at St Mary’s is a bit like elephants mating,’ explained Peterson. A remark that caused some mystification. ‘You know – there’s frantic activity at high level. There’s screaming and stamping. A lot of dust is raised. Nothing happens for two years and then you’re crushed by the result.”

— Jodi Taylor

3. “Helen, in a white coat and stethoscope, effortlessly achieving the sort of discipline for which lesser women would require black leather and a hunting crop, indicated we should form a line. Being St Mary’s, we formed several clumps and a rhomboid.”

— Jodi Taylor

4. “Always listen to your paranoia. It’s keeping you alive and almost certainly has more sense than you do.”

— Jodi Taylor

5. “Don’t stop believing. Ever. Without belief, there is no hope. And without hope, there is nothing. Always believe and then you’ll always have hope.’ I.”

— Jodi Taylor

6. “If in doubt, make tea. I’m at St. Mary’s: if hitting someone didn’t solve the problem, then drinking tea would.”

— Jodi Taylor

7. “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”

— Jodi Taylor

8. “A bit over-optimistic there, I thought. I once got lost on a staircase.”

— Jodi Taylor

9. “We all had to go on a course where bright, sparkly people with frightening smiles exhorted us to embrace change because those who can’t die out. I think they cited the dinosaurs.”

— Jodi Taylor

10. “Everyone in the building was pleasant and friendly and helpful. They had to be the nicest, politest, most inclusive sinister organisation up to no good in the whole history of sinister organisations up to no good.”

— Jodi Taylor

11. “No, he’s made a very good point,’ said Bashford provocatively. ‘Women are just vessels, you know.’ ‘That’s very true,’ said Sykes, smiling angelically at him. ‘I myself am a seventeen-thousand-ton Dreadnought class battleship with enough firepower to destroy a medium-sized city.”

— Jodi Taylor

12. “We walked for a long time in silence. I wasn’t going to nag and I know from Aunt Julia that according to men, mentioning the same thing twice in one decade constitutes nagging, so I shut up.”

— Jodi Taylor

13. “Thinking carefully is something that happens to other people.”

— Jodi Taylor

14. “He paused and looked me up and down. ‘Could you kill a man?’ I looked him up and down. ‘Eventually.”

— Jodi Taylor

15. “We traipsed back in again to inspect the damage. At least, Pennyroyal and Markham inspected the damage; Smallhope searched the prisoners and I put the kettle on. We all have our own areas of expertise.”

— Jodi Taylor

16. “Yes, yes, I did. I did this. I locked my pod. He couldn’t get to safety.”

— Jodi Taylor

17. “He’ll stand up for you and protect you and kill dragons for you, but he won’t always know that sometimes, he’s the dragon.”

— Jodi Taylor

18. “Groups of men stood around, discussing politics, finance, and their favoured chariot teams: all the things men talk about. You could easily substitute football for gladiators and business suits for togas: nothing changes.”

— Jodi Taylor

19. “In the unlikely event of anything going wrong, we will certainly never know anything about it.”

— Jodi Taylor

20. “For wherever Historians go, chaos is sure to follow in their wake.”

— Jodi Taylor

21. “To look away when something terrible is happening does not mean that the terrible thing ceases to happen. Someone.”

— Jodi Taylor

22. “If in doubt, make some tea.”

— Jodi Taylor

23. “Time is important in our organisation. If you can’t even get to an appointment in your own building on time, they argue, you’re not going to have much luck trying to find the Battle of Hastings. Sussman.”

— Jodi Taylor

24. “Ah well,’ he said, jovially. ‘As Joan of Arc probably said: “Build a girl a fire and she’s warm for a few minutes. Set a girl on fire and she’s warm for the rest of her life.”

— Jodi Taylor

25. “If you want someone dead then do it. I keep saying this. Don’t gloat – just shoot.”

— Jodi Taylor

26. “IT, that goes for you too. Any difficulties, tell me, so I can stare at you, baffled and confused.”

— Jodi Taylor

27. “She fought off a T-rex with just a pepper spray and bad language. You couldn’t be in better hands.”

— Jodi Taylor

28. “I spoke very quietly because the more quietly you speak, the more people listen.”

— Jodi Taylor

29. “There’s something very satisfying about outwitting religious fanaticism.”

— Jodi Taylor

30. “Society is rigid. Everyone knows everyone else in their world. Everyone has their place in the scheme of things. If you don’t belong to a family, a tribe, a village, a guild, whatever, you don’t exist then, either. And you can’t just pitch up somewhere without mutual acquaintances, recommendations, or letters of introduction. Life on the fringes of society, any society in any time, is tough.”

— Jodi Taylor

31. “I was climbing into bed one night, accompanied by all the usual paraphernalia – laptop, Kindle, box of tissues for my early morning nose – my nose will kill me one day – notebook and a couple of pens – because they all run out together – and a Terry Pratchett novel. The great man is probably most alarmed to find that death has not released him from the burden of having me take him to bed every night.”

— Jodi Taylor

32. “I avoided Thomas Hardy because everyone should, and anyway, I was depressed enough. And Dickens. I’ve never liked Dickens. I laughed like mad when Little Nell died.”

— Jodi Taylor

33. “Something writhed inside me and for a moment I was back in those long dark days when my world was so small I couldn’t even stand up in it.”

— Jodi Taylor

34. “Teenagers are inarticulate, acne-ridden lumps of inert matter. The only way you can ever induce movement is by trying to separate one from its mobile phone. And if you can do that then the only way you can stop it attacking is with rhinoceros tranquiliser.”

— Jodi Taylor

35. “Dr Maxwell. Why are you wearing a red snake in my office?’ ‘Sorry, sir. Whose office should I be wearing it in?”

— Jodi Taylor

36. “The only talents he possessed were delusions of adequacy.”

— Jodi Taylor

37. “And of course, in rounders, the balls don’t usually come at you with homicidal intent. That’s hockey.”

— Jodi Taylor

38. “The hero of his age. And yes, he really did have that bloody awful pudding-bowl haircut. They all did. Whether Henry was a royal trendsetter or it was practical under their helmets, I didn’t know. I certainly couldn’t think of any other reason for having the most hideous hairstyle in a History that includes Donald Trump.”

— Jodi Taylor

39. “This had once been a garden. Beautiful glazed pots stood against the walls but now were cracked, crumbling, and contained only dead bushes and weeds. A broken wooden bench had been overturned and lay forlornly on its side. Perhaps even gardens were considered sinful.”

— Jodi Taylor

40. “Green food is good for you’ ‘Can’t I have mint choc-chip ice-cream instead?”

— Jodi Taylor

41. “Loss of appetite is one of the first symptoms. When your body hasn’t a clue what’s going on, it tends to shut down in self-defence.”

— Jodi Taylor

42. “The three of them must disappear. Start a new life in a strange, new, foreign world. America, maybe. Or Manchester.”

— Jodi Taylor

43. “The ground never opens up and swallows you when you need it to.”

— Jodi Taylor

44. “We wrote our reports and sent them off to Dr Bairstow, who presented himself punctually at 0930 every morning to stare at us. It was beyond his nature to smile and encourage, so we could only assume he was there to intimidate any lingering.”

— Jodi Taylor

45. “The Society for the Protection of Historical Buildings was the official body whose task it was to oversee repairs and maintenance to our beloved but battered listed building. We had them on speed-dial. They had us on their black list.”

— Jodi Taylor

46. “I could have been a bomb-disposal expert, or a volunteer for the Mars mission, or a firefighter, or something safe and sensible. But no, I had to be an historian.”

— Jodi Taylor

47. “There would be a crafts tent and a small local farmers’ market for anyone who wanted to buy a small local farmer.”

— Jodi Taylor

48. “The truth is always important. It may not be popular, or fashionable, or convenient but it is always important. Somewhere there must always be a record of events as they actually occurred. Not the politically airbrushed record, or religious wishful thinking or the socially acceptable version, but the often inconvenient truth.’ ‘My.”

— Jodi Taylor

49. “Get out. Get out of our house. Both of you. It makes me sick just to have you here. You called me a nothing girl. Well, this nothing girl despises you. I’d rather be nothing and loved by Russell Checkland than anything else on earth. You would have ruined his life and he’s so much better than you. He’s kind and generous and passionate and everything you’re not. He will be a great painter one day. And – and he goes like a train.”

— Jodi Taylor

50. “Even a bucket can be a weapon if it’s wielded with malicious intent.”

— Jodi Taylor