Richard Hughes

They had never thought of Jamaica as dangerous. It was a beautiful place, they knew, and a very big one. It would always be full of bows and arrows and sails, but also ladies with rosebuds on their bosoms going up into the mountains, and docks where the ships put out to sea, and the fish with their fins taken off. The sky was bluer than it had ever seemed in England; the bird were supposed to be one aside, strange birds, surely, but magic ones; and this was the place they were going to in the spring, as Jabez said.

Adventure is something that should only happen to one’s enemies.

Children can be little mothers in moments of less profound interest.

A mechanical voice repeated that when the pipes emitted gas not flame, it was danger.

If you want to see beauty, you must look with the heart.

In England, all the flowers are small.

In the circumstances it is not surprising that Emily did not take things quite seriously, or have absolutely conventional views about the absolute seriousness of events.

It was alarming. Joss had a white face, like everybody else; but she had a red man listening to it.

Life is a mystery, and we are not perhaps fit to unravel it.

One should not look at calamities, only at final adjustments after the calamities have been allowed to happen.

But perhaps her appearance belied her; there was only one ‘perhaps’ about it; she could not belong to the evil part of the islands; she was young, and ingenuous, and often enigmatical.

When you saw a ship upon the sea, it was never that you gained sight of a friend. Rather, she said, when you saw a ship, it was—‘Though they come one by one,’ her sister said sharply, ‘I fear that too great a preponderance come save none at all.’