The
Nortonbury
Dictionary of Quotations

Dear Quote Hunter

Welcome to the Nortonbury Dictionary of Quotations.

This quotation dictionary differs from others in that so far it has been the sole and subjective property of one person - me. As I have read over the years, odd phrases, sentences and paragraphs have caught my eye and I have added them on. The quotes are from all manner of books, just a few of them - mostly the ones I collected in the early days - what might be termed in the conventional sense of the word 'famous literature', for the lit. quotes can be found elsewhere. Several are from non-fiction, reference works. Still more are from the world of the dime novel. And there are many other sources.

I hope that the variety of sources will offer a myriad of quotation sources that you may never otherwise have encountered, and would never have thought to exploit: trite Westerns, James Bond, or even the brilliant witticism in the middle of stuffy, turgid academic prose. Use liberally and gleefully.

I suppose a psychoanalyst could have quite a lot of fun, evaluating me from these quotations.

So have fun browsing, following the instructions given by my good friend and technical adviser Lovas Ábel, without whose help none of this could have appeared on-line.

A note on the quotations as they appear. Quotations (unlike academic citations) are taken from their initial setting and given a new, independent life. With this in mind, all of the examples collected here are treated as independent sentences, beginning with capital letters and ending with full stops, irrespective of their original punctuation.

Andy Rouse