M.M. Kaye Quotes

#1. There is no particular merit in fighting for your own skin when you know that it is fight or die, but there is considerable merit in being prepared to die when you know you can escape quite easily. Put at its lowest, there is a certain stubborn foolhardy heroism in that.

M.M. Kaye

#2. Perhaps I myself am a pompous and conceited old fool. And perhaps if these fools I complain of were French or Dutch or German I would not mind so much, because then I could say 'What else can you expect?' and feel superior. It is because they are men of my own race that I would have them all good.

M.M. Kaye

#3. For though she was ordinary, she possessed health, wit, courage, charm, and cheerfulness. But because she was not beautiful, no one ever seemed to notice these other qualities, which is so often the way of the world.

M.M. Kaye

#4. Have you really become so much an Angrezi that you believe your people have only to say "It is forbidden", for such old customs as this to cease immediately? Bah!

M.M. Kaye

#5. I still subscribe to the minority view that all horses are offensive weapons and not to be trusted a yard.

M.M. Kaye

#6. It is not an easy thing to be a woman and love with the whole heart: which men do not understand
having many loves, and delighting in danger and war.

M.M. Kaye

#7. Lavender's blue,
Rosemary's green,
When you are king,
I shall be queen

M.M. Kaye

#8. It was an age of lavishness. Of enormous meals, enormous families, enormous spreading skirts and an enormous, spreading Empire. An age of gross living, grinding poverty, inconceivable prudery, insufferable complacency and incomparable enterprise.

M.M. Kaye

#9. I cannot see anything admirable in stupidity, injustice and sheer incompetence in high places, and there is too much of all three in the present administration.

M.M. Kaye

#10. They rode out together from the shadows of the trees, leaving the Bala Hissar and the glowing torch of the burning Residency behind them, and spurred away across the flat lands towards the mountains ...
And it may even be that they found their Kingdom.

M.M. Kaye

#11. They were a fanatically independent people, much addicted to intrigue, treachery and murder, and that among their other national traits was an intolerance of rulers (or, if it came to that, of any form of authority whatsoever, other than their own desires).

M.M. Kaye

#12. In the absence of any concrete evidence. I plump for Leonard Stock as the murderer. First, because he's the most unlikely person, and as anyone who has ever read a murder story knows, it's always the most unlikely person who turns out to have done the deed--and fifty thousand authors can't be wrong.

M.M. Kaye

#13. Common sense will nearly always stand you in better stead than a slavish adherence to the conventions.

M.M. Kaye

#14. What could be more entrancing than a carefree nomadic existence camping, moving, exploring strange places and the ruins of forgotten empires, sleeping under canvas or the open sky, and giving no thought to the conventions and restriction of the modern world?

M.M. Kaye

#15. For the public, it seemed, preferred to believe that which disturbed it least and to ignore troublesome information. Which is a failing common to all nations.

M.M. Kaye

#16. Within that ageing outer shell we remain very much the same as we did in our late teens and early twenties.

M.M. Kaye