Frederick Rolfe quotes
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“The student of history knows no more refreshing recreation than that of nailing liars, like vermin, to the wall.”
-- Frederick RolfeSource : Frederick Rolfe (1931). “A History of the Borgias”
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“Brisk and prompt to war, soft and not in the least able to resist calamity, fickle in catching at schemes, and always striving after novelties – French characteristics remained unaltered twenty centuries after Julius Caesar made a note of them for all time.”
-- Frederick RolfeSource : "Hadrian the Seventh" by Frederick Rolfe, Penguin Modern Classics edition, Harmondsworth, (p. 58), 1963.
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“Truth is tarter than taradiddles; and nothing is tarter, terser, than truth on the track of tired trash in a trance.”
-- Frederick Rolfe -
“It's all nonsense to say that the Fifteenth Century can't possibly speak to the Twentieth, because it is the Fifteenth and not the Twentieth, and because those two Centuries haven't got a Common Denominator. They have. It's Human Nature.”
-- Frederick RolfeSource : "Don Tarquinio" by Frederick Rolfe, London: Chatto and Windus, (p. x), 1941.
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“An appeal to a goodness which is not in him is, to a vain and sensitive soul, a stinging insult.”
-- Frederick RolfeSource : "Hadrian the Seventh" by Frederick Rolfe, Penguin Modern Classics edition, Harmondsworth, (p. 296), 1963.
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“Most people have only half developed their single personalities. That a man should split his into four and more; and should develop each separately and perfectly, was so abnormal that many normals failed to understand it.”
-- Frederick RolfeSource : "Hadrian the Seventh" by Frederick Rolfe, Penguin Modern Classics edition, Harmondsworth, (p. 343), 1963.
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“The only person who is a worse liar than a faith healer is his patient.”
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Source : Alexander Gordon Smith (2010). “Escape from Furnace 2: Solitary”, p.132, Faber & Faber
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“Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.”
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