Hugh Walpole

Don't play for safety. It's the most dangerous thing in the world.

Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole (13 March 1884 – 1 June 1941) was an English novelist. He was a best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s, but has fallen into neglect since.

Quotes

The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and a thousand other things as well.
  • Tisn't life that matters! 'Tis the courage you bring to it.
    • Fortitude (1913) First lines
  • Don't play for safety. It's the most dangerous thing in the world.
    • Fortitude (1913)
  • The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and a thousand other things as well.
  • I am asking you again to marry me as I did a fortnight ago.
    • Wintersmoon (1928) First lines
  • Over this country, when the giant Eagle flings the shadow of his wing, the land is darkened. So compact is it that the wing covers all its extent in one pause of the flight. The sea breaks on the pale line of the shore; to the Eagle's proud glance waves run in to the foot of the hills that are like rocks planted in green water.
    • Rogue Herries (1930) First lines
  • The most wonderful of all things in life, I believe, is the discovery of another human being with whom one's relationship has a glowing depth, beauty, and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing, it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of Divine accident.
    • As quoted in Wisdom for the Soul : Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006) by Larry Chang, p. 597

Quotes about Walpole

Sorted alphabetically by author or source
  • The temptation to neglect good ordinary writers, and thereby to exaggerate the importance of the unusual, is one that, even in the moment of deploring it, is hardly to be resisted. Mr. Walpole happens to be a popular as well as a good writer. A conscientious craftsman, he has produced book after book, every one of which has been in some degree robust, charming, and eminently sensible. His work exhibits, moreover, surprising versatility.
    • Gerald Bullett, Modern English Fiction: A Personal View, London, Herbert Jenkins, 1926. Quoted in R. Z. Temple and M. Tucker, A Library of Literary Criticism. New York, Frederick Ungar, 1966 (p. 284).
  • Of the general soundness of Mr. Walpole's work I am firmly convinced. He is distinctly a man of his time. We see him grappling with the truth of things spiritual and material with his usual earnestness, and we can discern the characteristics of this acute and sympathetic explorer of human nature.
    • Joseph Conrad, "Introductory Note" to A Hugh Walpole Anthology (1921)
  • He [Walpole] has done more than any man alive to make modern English writers, some of them struggling, some active and unsparing rivals of his own, familiar to a wider public, both in the United States and in England.
    • Frank Swinnerton, Swinnerton: An Autobiography. Quoted in Hart-Davis, Rupert, Hugh Walpole. New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1952.
  • Mr Walpole’s gift is neither for passion nor for satire, but he possesses an urbane observant humour. He has a true insight into the nature of domesticity...These are the small things in which Mr Walpole is invariably happy, and in our view it is no disparagement to a writer to say that his gift is for the small things rather than for the large.
    • Virginia Woolf, "Review of "The Green Mirror" by Hugh Walpole". Times Literary Supplement, 4 January 1918. Quoted in Woolf, Virginia, The Essays of Virginia Woolf: Volume Two, 1912-1918. San Diego, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.
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