Silas Quotes

“The Sweat and the Furrow was Silas Weekley being earthly and spade-conscious all over seven hundred pages. The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas's last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the the hayloft, everyone else lying low in the barn. The rain dripped from the thatch, and the manure steamed in the midden. Silas never omitted the manure. It was not Silas's fault that its steam provided the only uprising element in the picture. If Silas could have discovered a brand of steam that steamed downwards, Silas would have introduced it.”

“It seems as you'll never know the rights of it; but that doesn't hinder there being a rights, Master Marner, for all it's dark to you and me.''No,' said Silas, 'no; that doesn't hinder. Since the time the child was sent to me and I've come to love her as myself, I've had light enough to trusten by; and now she says she'll never leave me, I think I shall trusten until I die.”

“Praise is the most efficient tool to win many battles at once. It is through praise that the walls of Jericho collapsed, the same way Paul and Silas praised their way out of jail.”

“...there's never a garden in all the parish but what there's endless waste in it for want o' somebody as could use everything up. It's what I think to myself sometimes, as there need nobody run short o' victuals if the land was made the most on, and there was never a morsel but what could find it's way to a mouth.”

“When people give me a compliment, I just look back and smile, as I am just a glimpse of both my father's. Both earthly and heavenly.”

“Silas consumed only one food, and it was not bananas.”

“For me, religion is like a rhinoceros: I don't have one, and I'd really prefer not to be trampled by yours.”

“I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the key to all good writing. And that every character has to have a secret.”

“I was in New York for a little while, doing some really bad theater. I did some great stuff, too, but there were Saturday morning theater performances in one-third-filled church basements. So, I paid my dues.”

“The first thing to be done by a biographer in estimating character is to examine the stubs of the victim's cheque books.”