18 quotes
"You can't go through life sitting on the fence. You've got to make decisions, and sometimes you're pretty sure to make them wrong."
No Highway (1948)
" People believe what they want to believe."
No Highway (1948)
Airline stewardesses are not chosen for their repellent qualities, and Miss Corder was a very charming girl.
No Highway (1948)
They sat by the lake for a couple of hours, talking, finding out about each other.
No Highway (1948)
She recognised in Mr Honey a man of moods, capable of deep depression; all geniuses, she had read, were men like that.
No Highway (1948)
Environment has its effect on everybody, and for a time it had a numbing effect on him, preventing him from thinking clearly.
No Highway (1948)
He was a dark-haired, fresh-faced boy of twenty-one or twenty-two, who adopted the pose that everything was a joke and nothing really mattered.
No Highway (1948)
She did not understand what all that meant, but it was evidently something very near his heart, and so she said, "How splendid!"
No Highway (1948)
"If you're going to make your life in a new country you should go before you're twenty-five. After that you start to get associations, little grooves and anchors, that make it difficult to change."
No Highway (1948)
Differential equations won't help you much in the design of aeroplanes — not yet, anyhow.
He was like a little boy let loose in a toy shop, uncertain which of the attractive treasures to pick up first.
No Highway (1948)
Success did not thrill him in the least. He regarded a success merely as a convenient platform from which to plan a further advance.
No Highway (1948)
It has been said that an engineer is a man who can do for ten shillings what any fool can do for a pound; if that be so, we were certainly engineers.
Personal unpleasantness always upset his work; he could not think clearly if his mind was full of hard things that had been said about him, and he liked thinking clearly. Rows frightened him; he would go to considerable lengths to avoid them.
No Highway (1948)
Whatever the little man showed him or explained, the designer did nothing but grunt. This was one of his more offensive techniques; he would stand in silence listening to a halting explanation and then grunt, a grunt expressing an ill-tempered scepticism or plain disbelief.
No Highway (1948)
He was one of that great class of Englishmen who love their wives and trust them unquestioningly with their money and their honour, but are apt to hedge a little over their motor-cars.
"A wiser man than I once said that an unusual man is apt to look unusual. In my department we seek for original thinkers, for the untiring brain that pursues its object by day and by night. If the untiring brain refuses to leave its quest to attend to such matters as the neat arrangement of collar and tie or to removing food stains from its waistcoat, I do not greatly complain."
No Highway (1948)
All good designers are difficult men or they could not be good designers; I think everybody at the table was more or less aware of that. We set ourselves to mollify the great man, and I say that with sincerity. A great man he was, a great designer, and a superlative engineer. But not an easy man to deal with. No.
No Highway (1948)