Top 80 Nevil Shute Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “A Congreve clock?’ Captain Petersen was puzzled. ‘It’s a clock that keeps time by a steel ball running on a zig-zag track down an inclined plane,’ Keith told him. ‘Only it doesn’t keep very good time. It takes thirty seconds for the ball to run down one way – then the plane tilts and it runs back again. It’s quite fascinating to watch.”

— Nevil Shute

52. “There are some things about oneself that it’s not very nice to wake up to.”

— Nevil Shute

53. “When a good man employs others he becomes a slave to the job, for the job is the guarantee for the security of many men.”

— Nevil Shute

54. “They’re terribly anxious to see him married, and they’re always gossiping. And then Mrs. Plowden said, “He might do worse than look in his own kitchen, to my way of thinking.” And Annie said, “Aye, that’s a fact. It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened, and it won’t be the last.”

— Nevil Shute

55. “It was her dog getting killed that put the lid on it,” said Viola, seven years later. “Funny, that, wasn’t it? She stood up quite well when your brother got killed and when her father got killed, but when the dog got killed it finished her. I suppose she felt responsible or something.” “I suppose she did,” I said. “What happened after.”

— Nevil Shute

56. “I had travelled the world and I had come to realise, in faint surprise, that I had seen no countryside that could compare in pastoral beauty with that of my own home. It takes a long time for an Australian to accept the fact that the wide, bustling, sophisticated world of the northern hemisphere cannot compare with his own land in certain ways;.”

— Nevil Shute

57. “A gift by women, for women.”

— Nevil Shute

58. “I was very depressed in those months, because it’s not funny to lose both your feet when you’re thirty years old.”

— Nevil Shute

59. “It was incongruous at Coombargana. In a great city such things happen now and then, where people are too strained and hurried to pay much attention to the griefs of others, but in a small rural community like ours, led by wise and tolerant people such as my father and mother, staffed by good types culled and weeded out over the years, such secret, catastrophic griefs do not occur. Troubles at Coombargana had always been small troubles in my lifetime.”

— Nevil Shute

60. “Into the world of romance, of make-belief and double brandies!”

— Nevil Shute

61. “When things like this happen there’s just nothing to be done about it; even suffering itself is a mere waste of time.”

— Nevil Shute

62. “He met the femme de chambre upon the landing. ‘I have made up my mind,’ he said heavily. ‘La petite Rose may come with us to England; I will take her to her father. She must be ready to start to-morrow morning, at seven o’clock.”

— Nevil Shute

63. “I stopped reading and stared round the room. There were the new curtains, the new shades on all the lamps, the deep new pile of the Indian carpet beneath my feet, the new loose cover of the chair that I was sitting in, the slightly different appearance of the wallpaper by the electric switch, the gleam of the new paint. I had not noticed any of them.”

— Nevil Shute

64. “Americans are like that.’ The other stared at him incredulously. ‘It would cost a great deal of money to provide for a child, perhaps for years. One does not do that lightly for a foreign child of which one knows nothing.’ ‘It’s just the sort of thing they do do,’ said the old man. ‘They would pour out their money in a cause like that.”

— Nevil Shute

65. “She said, “Aye, they’re getting for him everything the heart of man could desire, saving the one thing.” I asked, “What’s that?” She said, “A wife.” She’s very shrewd.”

— Nevil Shute

66. “Some folks just have to have the liquor, times like these.” He eyed a policeman on the corner. “That’s what the cops here seem to think, in this city, at any rate. I’ve never seen a drunk arrested yet, not just for being drunk.”

— Nevil Shute

67. “I would divide the senior executives of the engineering world into two categories, the starters and the runners, the men with a creative instinct who can start a new venture and the men who can run it to make it show a profit... I was a starter and useless as a runner.”

— Nevil Shute

68. “He sank into an apathy of heat and dust and sweat, and joined the morose ten per cent of men in South Fast Asia Command whose wives had let them down.”

— Nevil Shute

69. “He searched his mind for something he could do for her to match her generosity in some small measure. “Like to go to the pictures tonight?” he said. “I see there’s Cary Grant on at the Regal.” Four days later he left Poole on the flying boat for Rangoon.”

— Nevil Shute

70. “This may have been what John and I were brought together for,’ she said. ‘In thirty years the world may need one of these little ones.’ She paused. ‘It may be Ronnie or it may be Willem, or it may be little Pierre who does great things for the world,’ she said. ‘But when that happens, monsieur, it will be because I met your son to show him Paris, and we fell in love.”

— Nevil Shute

71. “He was just entering the club ahead of me, a tall and rather emaciated man of about seventy, a little unsteady on his feet. He tripped over the doormat as he went in and stumbled forward; the hall porter jumped out and caught him by the elbow.”

— Nevil Shute

72. “One had to live in the new world and do one’s best, forgetting about the old; now it was push bikes.”

— Nevil Shute

73. “I think dogs need our prayers more than people. We know that God looks after people when they die and that Daddy and Mummy and Bill are all right, but we don’t know that about dogs.”

— Nevil Shute

74. “Jerry stood the old man to a glass of mild, and asked, “What do you think of all these Americans in Trenarth, Mr Parsons?” The ancient piped in his old quavering voice, “I like them very well; oh, very well indeed. We get on nicely with them here. I don’t like these white ones that are coming in now, though. I hope they don’t send us no more o’ them.” It was too good not to be repeated; it ran round both whites and blacks that afternoon.”

— Nevil Shute

75. “You felt to look at him that he would be wonderful upon a horse. I.”

— Nevil Shute

76. “If Ronnie Clarke knew about Brenda and myself I had probably told him a bit more, but I didn’t really care. He was a very old friend now, and there are some things that a friend ought to know.”

— Nevil Shute

77. “Okay,’ said Jack phlegmatically. ‘Be seeing you.’ Friends and women, he knew, never really mixed.”

— Nevil Shute

78. “He could not elucidate it any further for her, and they drove on to the big hardware store. It had only a few customers, and very few assistants. They left the baby in the car and went through to the gardening department, and searched some time for an assistant.”

— Nevil Shute

79. “It was a gambler’s action, but his whole life had probably been made up of gambles; it could hardly be otherwise in the outback.”

— Nevil Shute

80. “He did not display his locomotive or his traction engine to his fellow professors, fearing that if he did so he would not be taken seriously when he spoke on mediaeval poetry.”

— Nevil Shute

81. “Mr Parkinson told him what was his due. “On your salary scale, the firm gives three months’ sick leave on full pay. Then if you are still unfit for work, another three months on half pay.”

— Nevil Shute

82. “You mean, business is slowing down?” She nodded. “Lots of my friends are out of a job now. People aren’t working like they used to, and they don’t want secretaries.”

— Nevil Shute

83. “For the first time Alix began to understand long-distance flying. It was not courage, or resourcefulness, or ability that counted in this game, though they were necessary subsidiary qualities. It was the capacity to work efficiently at tiring, menial tasks upon the ground that made great flights a success.”

— Nevil Shute

84. “Her ideas about reporters had been moulded by the cinema; it was a surprise to her to find that in real life they could be kind and helpful people with good manners.”

— Nevil Shute

85. “Cyrus Shawn O’Leary got that letter on the Friday morning at his home in Ann Arbor near Detroit.”

— Nevil Shute