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Image of the quote is loading... SaveSave Better to be a laughing-stock than lose the fort for fear of being one. - Quote by Rosemary Sutcliff

Better to be a laughing-stock than lose the fort for fear of being one.

Rosemary Sutcliff
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More Quotes From Rosemary Sutcliff

He loved me and didn't want me hurt. What was worse, he didn't even understand that I had the right to be hurt.
Rosemary Sutcliff
But against sandfly fever one could be inoculated, and I have another, hideously vivid picture of a great menacing brute of a doctor sticking a Thing that ended in a vicious needle into my mother's arm. Mad to defend my own, I scrambled off my father's knee, and flew to her rescue. I fixed my teeth in the doctor's horrible hairy wrist and hung on like a terrier, until my father succeeded in prising me away. Afterwards, everybody said how wonderful the doctor had been, because he continued calmly giving the inoculation while I was prised off him, instead of breaking the needle in my mother's arm. But nobody said how brave it was of me, only three years old, when all is said and done, and gone in the legs at that, to take on such fearful odds for the sake of love.
Rosemary Sutcliff
That is our Shield Ring, our last stronghold; not the barrier fells and the totter-moss between, but something in the hearts of men.
Rosemary Sutcliff
As we grow older, we forget how near to the ground we once were. I do not mean merely because our heads were lower down than they are now, though of course that comes into it; but near in the sense of kinship. A small child is aware of the sights and smells and textures of the ground with an acute awareness that we lose in growing up.
Rosemary Sutcliff
Jean and I had, as I think a great many best friends have, a secret make-believe world of our own. We had only to say, 'Let's be Lilian and Diana,' and, as though it was a magical formula, step straight into a world that was as real to us as the world of school and parents and cornflakes for breakfast. . . . In the summer after my father retired, Jean came to stay with me in North Devon. On the first morning, we retired to the rustic summerhouse. 'Let's be Lilian and Diana . . .'But the magic formula no longer worked. We tried and tried; but we could only _act_ Lilian and Diana; we could not _be_ them any more. I suppose the break had been too long, and we were just too old. We went on trying for days, searching for the way in. But it was like searching for the lost door to a lost country. Finally, without anything actually being said between us, we gave up and turned to other things. But with Lilian and Diana, something of Jean and Rosemary had gone too: left behind the lost door to the lost country. It was one of the saddest experiences of my young life.
Rosemary Sutcliff
It is lonely never to have been loved, only devoured.
Rosemary Sutcliff
She was wonderful; no mother could have been more wonderful. But ever after, she demanded that I should not forget it, nor cease to be grateful, nor hold an opinion different from her own, nor even, as I grew older, feel the need for any companionship but hers.
Rosemary Sutcliff
Uncle Acton spent the whole of his working life in India, for the simple reason that he gave up work very young.
Rosemary Sutcliff
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