Eye - 22 March 2013
Quakerly quotables from John Myhill
John Myhill, of Norfolk and Waveney Area Meeting, has been a busy bee and approached Eye with an offering of ‘something entirely different – for all those Quakers looking for a book to read perhaps!’ A baker’s dozen of Quakerly quotables…
The good
‘There was something neat and high bred, a Quakerish elegance, about the rogue that hit my fancy on the spot.’
- Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
‘I always say there is more real pluck in the ranks of the Quakers than in a whole regiment of soldiers.’
- John McGilchrist, Life of Richard Cobden
‘I have repeatedly warned the scientists that Quakers are fundamentally far more scientific than the official biologists.’
- George Bernard Shaw, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Search for God
‘Tom’s employer was a member of the Society of Friends and had gone up in front of the board and managed to get Tom a six month exemption.’
- Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes of the Museum
The bad
‘I have noticed how some of my most garrulous friends have joined the Quakers not because the meeting gives them an opportunity to talk, but because they claim to prefer silence to a sermon.’
- H Williams, My Word
‘The claimants to the original Black Drop (opium in vegetable acid) were three in number, all Quakers.’
- Molly Lefebure, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
‘She seemed reserved, almost cool, but friendly, austere and inward looking. She wore a severely cut earth brown suit that looked a little old fashioned… Involuntarily I thought of Quakers.’
- Hans Schaefer, Beckett
‘I was brought up a Friend, but have lost the Light.’
- John Fowles, A Maggot
And the downright dangerous
‘A certain tendency to insanity has always attended the opening of the religious sense in men, as if they had been blasted with the excess of light… the convulsions of George Fox and his Quakers.’
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Over-Soul
‘The woman told the leaders of the nuclear powers they must surrender the keys that would trigger nuclear war. They handed over the keys. She placed them on a cushion and took them to the pope. He looked down where, in his hands, on the cushion, the possible destruction of the planet innocently lay. Finally, in a voice of absolute authority he said “The Quakers shall have the keys.” I woke agitated.’
- Lindsay Clarke, The Chymical Wedding
‘Mr Staunton stared a little, and asked if her father were a Quaker. “God forbid Sir”, said Jeanie, “he is nae schismatic nor sectary, nor ever treated for sic black commodities as theirs.”’
- Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian
‘Yield himself up in this peaceful room, to what was really a vague formless anodyne of almost Quakerish severity.’
- John Cowper-Powys, Wolf Solent
‘Here’s a Quaker come to bless and kiss us / Come and have a gin and bitter missus.’
- John Masefield, The Everlasting Mercy
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