Hugh Walpole
British writer (1884-1941)
Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole (13 March 1884 – 1 June 1941) was an English novelist. He was a best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s, but has fallen into neglect since.
Quotes
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- Tisn't life that matters! 'Tis the courage you bring to it.
- Fortitude (1913) First lines
- Don't play for safety. It's the most dangerous thing in the world.
- Fortitude (1913)
- The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and a thousand other things as well.
- Reading : An Essay (1926); also quoted as a statement at Keswick, in The Education Outlook (1926) Vol. 78; this quote has often become misattributed to Horace Walpole, and misquoted as "...a thousand other things well".
- I am asking you again to marry me as I did a fortnight ago.
- Wintersmoon (1928) First lines
- Over this country, when the giant Eagle flings the shadow of his wing, the land is darkened. So compact is it that the wing covers all its extent in one pause of the flight. The sea breaks on the pale line of the shore; to the Eagle's proud glance waves run in to the foot of the hills that are like rocks planted in green water.
- Rogue Herries (1930) First lines
- The most wonderful of all things in life, I believe, is the discovery of another human being with whom one's relationship has a glowing depth, beauty, and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing, it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of Divine accident.
- As quoted in Wisdom for the Soul : Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006) by Larry Chang, p. 597
Quotes about Walpole
edit- Sorted alphabetically by author or source
- Of the general soundness of Mr. Walpole's work I am firmly convinced. He is distinctly a man of his time. We see him grappling with the truth of things spiritual and material with his usual earnestness, and we can discern the characteristics of this acute and sympathetic explorer of human nature.
- Joseph Conrad, "Introductory Note" to A Hugh Walpole Anthology (1921)
- Henry James and John Buchan praised him. Joseph Conrad, T S Eliot and Virginia Woolf were kind about him. What's more, his books sold enormously well on both sides of the Atlantic, he was knighted, and he became very rich ... Yet now he has vanished completely, his books not even to be found on the back shelves of most second hand shops, dismissed as "unreadable".
