William McFee Quotes

William McFee shares grand, thought-provoking reflections on fate, choice, and the weight of history.

34 quotes

1. To those who live and toil and lowly die, Who past beyond and leave no lasting trace, To those from whom our queen Prosperity Has turned away her fair and fickle face.

2. It is so much easier to tell intimate things in the dark.

3. The world belongs to the Enthusiast who keeps cool.

4. People don't ever seem to realise that doing what's right's no guarantee against misfortune.

5. Responsibility's like a string we can only see the middle of. Both ends are out of sight.

6. London is always beautiful to those who love and understand that extraordinary microcosm; but at five of a summer morning there is about her an exquisite quality of youthful fragrance and debonair freshness which goes to the heart.

7. Roses just now predominate. There is a satisfying solidity about the bunches, a glorious abundance which, in a commodity so easily enjoyed without ownership, is scarcely credible. I feel no desire to own these huge aggregations of odorous beauty. It would be like owning a harem, one imagines.

8. 'And what are those things at all?' demands my companion, diverted for a moment from the flowers. She nods towards a mass of dull-green affairs piled on mats or being lifted from big vans. She is a Cockney and displays surprise when she is told those things are bananas. She shrugs and turns again to the musk-roses, and forgets. But to me, as the harsh, penetrating odor of the green fruit cuts across the heavy perfume of the flowers, comes a picture of the farms in distant Colombia or perhaps Costa Rica. There is nothing like an odor to stir memories.

9. While my companion is busily engaged in getting copy for a special article about the Market, I step nimbly out of the way of a swarthy gentleman from Calabria, who with his two-wheeled barrow is the last link in the immense chain of transportation connecting the farmer in the distant tropics and the cockney pedestrian who halts on the sidewalk and purchases a banana for a couple of pennies.

10. A trouble is a trouble, and the general idea, in the country, is to treat it as such, rather than to snatch the knotted cords from the hand of God and deal out murderous blows.

11. A young man must let his ideas grow, not be continually rooting them up to see how they are getting on.

12. If fate means you to lose, give him a good fight anyhow.

13. It is extraordinary how many emotional storms one may weather in safety if one is ballasted with ever so little gold.

14. One must choose between Obscurity with Efficiency, and Fame with its inevitable collateral of Bluff.

15. Steam engines are very human. Their very weaknesses are understandable. Steam engines do not flash back and blow your face in. They do not short-circuit and rive your heart with imponderable electric force. They have arms and legs and warm hearts and veins full of warm vapour. Give us steam every time. You know where you are with steam.

16. Terrible and sublime thought, that every moment is supreme for some man and woman, every hour the apotheosis of some passion!

17. There are some men whom a staggering emotional shock, so far from making them mental invalids for life, seems, on the other hand, to awaken, to galvanize, to arouse into an almost incredible activity of soul.

18. He tells a story with the narrative power of a master of that art. His prose style has the rare combination of rhythm and smoothness together with a great deal of force... A quality not so much of style as of the writer's personality is his quiet, dry, and cutting humor. It crops out everywhere in his work... In the matter of his use of words, McFee seems to be going through some evolution. In Casuals of the Sea, he employs a number of words that necessitate more than an occasional reference to a good dictionary; however, in his later work, he has rid himself of this fault to a great degree, although a use of apt, but unusual, words may be said to be characteristic of his prose.

19. He made a list of authors that floored me, beginning with Sinclair Lewis, William McFee - at that time famous for Casuals of the Sea, Command, Captain Macedoine's Daughter - and Vincent Sheehan and Mignon Eberhardt. Well, those were the plums, and he said, 'I don't know if I can get any of them.' Well, he got them all--every single one of them! ... McFee was quite deaf and like so many deaf people he shrieked at the top of his lungs and had a funny habit - he'd grab you by the ear and scream into your ear. Of course, he couldn't hear. He'd start screaming in Harry Maule's ear and Harry would try to quiet him down. I still remember that we used to fall on the floor laughing at McFee and Harry Maule. What a combination this was. He was a nice man - McFee - an old sea captain. Unfortunately he drifted off and lost his popularity, but he did write three fine books: Casuals of the Sea, Captain Macedoine's Daughter, and Command. I think they're as good as Conrad's Sea Tales.

20. Woman dwell always in the palace of unpalatable truth and never by any chance is there a magic talisman to save them from their destiny. Speech is their ultimate need. We men exist for them only in so far as we can be described.

21. There is far too much talk of love and grief benumbing the faculties, turning the hair gray, and destroying a man's interest in his work. Grief has made many a man look younger.

22. People don't ever seem to realize that doing what's right, writes no guarantee against misfortune.

23. An Englishman never takes his collar off when he is writing. How can you expect him to show you his soul?

24. It may be that, while we plodding realists go on, for ever preoccupied with our daily chores, abstracting a microscopic pleasure from each microscopic duty, your true romantic has the truer vision, and beholds, afar off, in all its lurid splendour and terrible proportions, the piquant adventure we call life.

25. Fear, born of that stern matron, Responsibility.

26. A young man must let his ideas grow, not be continually rooting them up to see yow they are getting on.

27. The artist in his teens who is happy is a charlatan. Life comes bursting in all around lis too suddenly, too crudely, too cruelly, for happiness.

28. Wives invariably flourish when deserted; ... it is the deserting male, the reckless idealist rushing about the world seeking a non-existent felicity, who often ends in disaster.

29. The world is not interested in the storms you encountered, but did you bring in the ship?

30. The artist isn't particularly keen on getting a thing done, as you call it. He gets his pleasure out of doing it, playing with it, fooling with it, if you like. The mere completion of it is an incident.

31. There is a pleasure unknown to the landsman in reading at sea.

32. The worldly relations of men and women often form an equation that cancels out without warning when some insignificant factor has been added to either side.

33. The wives who are not deserted, but who have to feed and clothe and comfort and scold and advise, are the true objects of commiseration; wives whose existence is given over to a ceaseless vigil of cantankerous affection.

34. There is nothing like a start, and being born, however pessimistic one may become in later years, is undeniably a start.