Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne was the vicar of this parish, but when the parsonage house was destroyed by fire, he moved to nearby Coxwold. While in Sutton he conceived, wrote and published the first two books of Tristram Shandy. It is probable that the book was based on Sutton and the people who lived in and around it, and Sutton on the Forest may be regarded as the true birthplace of the modern novel.
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Famous quotes by laurence sterne:
“There are a thousand unnoticed openings ... which let a penetrating eye at once into a man’s soul; and I maintain ... that a man of sense does not lay down his hat in coming into a room,—or take it up in going out of it, but something escapes, which discovers him.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“The duce of any other rule have I to govern myself by in this affair—and if I had one ... I would twist it and tear it to pieces, and throw it into the fire when I had done—Am I warm? I am, and the cause demands it—a pretty story! is a man to follow rules—or rules to follow him?”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Most of us are aware of and pretend to detest the barefaced instances of that hypocrisy by which men deceive others, but few of us are upon our guard or see that more fatal hypocrisy by which we deceive and over-reach our own hearts.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“To say a man is fallen in love,—or that he is deeply in love,—or up to the ears in love ... carries an idiomatical kind of implication, that love is a thing below a man:Mthis is ... Plato’s opinion, which ... I hold to be damnable and heretical.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“What these perplexities of my uncle Toby were,—’tis impossible for you to guess;Mif you could,—I should blush ... as an author; inasmuch as I set no small store by myself upon this very account, that my reader has never yet been able to guess at any thing. And ... if I thought you was able to form the least ... conjecture to yourself, of what was to come in the next page,—I would tear it out of my book.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)