Arthur Ransome Quotes

Arthur Ransome's page offers thoughtful musings on adventure, doing things right, and the quiet moments of nature.

38 quotes

  1. Houses, are but badly built boats so firmly aground that you cannot think of moving them. They are definitely inferior things, belonging to the vegetable not the animal world, rooted and stationary, incapable of gay transition. I admit, doubtfully, as exceptions, snail-shells and caravans. The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting-place.

  2. Racundra's First Cruise (Chapter 1), 1923

  3. BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WON'T DROWN.

  4. Swallows and Amazons (Chapter 1), 1930

  5. They found, like many explorers before them, that somehow, in their absence, they had got into trouble at home.

  6. Swallowdale (Chapter 4), 1931

  7. When a thing's done, it's done, and if it's not done right, do it differently next time.

  8. Swallowdale (Chapter 8), 1931

  9. 'Only, the beastly Arctic won't freeze,'

  10. Winter Holiday (Chapter 3), 1933

  11. Softly, at first, as if it hardly meant it, the snow began to fall.

  12. Winter Holiday (Chapter 5), 1933

  13. A pigeon a day keeps the natives away

  14. Pigeon Post Title page and Chapter 4), 1936

  15. Grab a chance and you won't be sorry for a might-have-been.

  16. We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea (Title page), 1937

  17. A lot of things were lucky,' said Daddy, and suddenly, while they were walking along, brought his hand down on John's shoulder and gave it a bit of a squeeze. 'You'll be a seaman yet, my son.' And John, for one dreadful moment, felt that something was going wrong with his eyes. A sort of wetness, and hotness... Partly salt... Pleased though he was, he found himself biting his lower lip pretty hard, and looking the other way.

  18. We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea (Chapter 23), 1937

  19. She's got a rum job, but she knows how to do it, and to have a job and know how to do it is one of the best things in this life. And if only she stops hankering after Cambridge...

  20. Missee Lee (Chapter 26), 1941

  21. Dorothea blew out her candle and settled down in the middle of the big spare room bed. An owl called in the woods. 'Not a barn owl, but a tawny,' thought Dick, listening to the sharp 'Gewick! Gewick!' as he fell asleep. A smell of new-mown hay drifted from the meadows on the further side of the river. 'There isn't a lovelier place in all the world,' thought Dorothea. London last night, and now Beckfoot. The summer holidays had begun.

  22. The Picts and the Martyrs (Chapter 2), 1943

  23. What's hit's history: what's missed's mystery.

  24. Great Northern? (Chapter 9), 1947

  25. You write not for children but for yourself. And if by good fortune children enjoy what you enjoy, why then you are a writer of children's books.

  26. Fishing is not like billiards, in which it is possible to attain a disgusting perfection.

  27. Fishing books , lit by emotion recollected in tranquility, are like poetry. .. . We do not think of them as books but as men. They are our companions and not only riverside. Summer and winter they are with us and what a pleasant company they are.

  28. Good fishermen know that in talking about fishing, nothing is more interesting than the truth.

  29. For at least the last 275 years the honesty of fishermen has been somewhat questionable. It should be noted that Izaak Walton whose book published in 1653 spoke not of anglers and , but anglers OR very honest men .

  30. There are two distinct visits to tackle-shops, the visit to buy tackle and the visit which may be described as Platonic when, being for some reason unable to fish, we look for an excuse to go in, and waste the tackle dealer's time.

  31. I fished a little while ago with a man, not in his first youth, who had wasted the flower of his life on business and golf and gardening and motoring and marriage, and had in this way postponed his initiation (to fly fishing) far too long.

  32. . . perhaps the greatest satisfaction on the first day of the season is the knowledge in the evening that the whole of the rest of the season is to come.

  33. “The island had come to seem one of those places seen from the train that belong to a life in which we shall never take part.”

  34. “Who would wave a flag to be rescued if they had a desert island of their own? That was the thing that spoilt Robinson Crusoe . In the end he came home. There never ought to be an end.”

  35. Grab a chance and you won't be sorry for what might have been

  36. “The storm came pretty soon," said John. "They won't have got much further before it caught them. We may find them any minute. They'll have got off the ice the moment the snow began." "If only they had sense," said Susan. "But they haven't got any, not that sort. People oughtn't to be allowed to be brought up in towns.”

  37. “But the big hills up at the lake helped to make him feel that the houseboat man did not matter. The hills had been there before Captain Flint. They would be there for ever. That, somehow was comforting.”

  38. ...next to the pleasure of reading a favourite fishing book comes that of persuading a friend to read it too.