The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Preface

‘Memoirs of My Life’ (1796) ch. 4
I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.
‘Memoirs of My Life’ (1796) ch. 4 n.
Crowds without company, and dissipation without pleasure.
‘Memoirs of My Life’ (1796) ch. 5
The captain of the Hampshire grenadiers...has not been useless to the historian of the Roman
empire.
‘Memoirs of My Life’ (1796) ch. 5 (on his own army service)
It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the
Capitol, while the barefoot friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of
writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.
‘Memoirs of My Life’ (1796) ch. 6
I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the
establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread
over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable
companion, and that whatsoever might be the future date of my History, the life of the historian
must be short and precarious.
‘Memoirs of My Life’ (1796) ch. 8 (on the completion of ‘Decline and Fall’)
My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the obscurity of a learned
language.
‘Memoirs of My Life’ (1796) ch. 8 (parodied as ‘decent obscurity’ in the Anti-Jacobin, 1797-8)
The abbreviation of time, and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the
evening of life.
‘Memoirs of My Life’ (1796) ch. 8
7.37 Orlando Gibbons 1583-1625
The silver swan, who, living had no note,
When death approached unlocked her silent throat.
‘The First Set of Madrigals and Motets of Five Parts’ (1612) ‘The Silver Swan’
7.38 Stella Gibbons 1902-89
Every year, in the fulness o’ summer, when the sukebind hangs heavy from the wains...’tes the
same. And when the spring comes her hour is upon her again. ‘Tes the hand of Nature and we
women cannot escape it.
‘Cold Comfort Farm’ (1932) ch. 5
Something nasty in the woodshed.
‘Cold Comfort Farm’ (1932) ch. 10
By god, D. H. Lawrence was right when he had said there must be a dumb, dark, dull, bitter
belly-tension between a man and a woman, and how else could this be achieved save in the long
monotony of marriage?