Quotes from L.P. Hartley

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

It's better to write about things you feel than about things you know about.

To see things as they really were--what an empoverishment!

You insisted on thinking of them as angels, even if they were fallen angels.

Grown-ups didn't seem to realize that for me, as for most other schoolboys, it was easier to keep silent than to speak. I was a natural oyster.

To my mind's eye, my buried memories of Brandham Hall are like effects of chiaroscuro, patches of light and dark: it is only with effort that I see them in terms of colour. There are things I know, though I don't know how I know them, and things that I remember. Certain things are established in my mind as facts, but no picture attaches to them; on the other hand there are pictures unverified by any fact which recur obsessively, like the landscape of a dream.

You flew too near the sun and you were scorched.

Try now, try now, it isn't too late' ... Excitement, like hysteria, bubbled up in me from a hundred unsealed springs. If it isn't too late, I thought confusedly, neither it is too early: I haven't much time left to spoil. It was the last flicker of instinct of self-preservation which had failed me so signally at Brandham Hall.

El pasado es un país extranjero: allí las cosas se hacen de manera distinta.

Not Adam and Eve, after eating the apple, could have been more upset than I was.

I had never met a lord before, nor had I ever expected to meet one. It didn't matter what he looked like: he was a lord first, and a human being, with a face and limbs and body, long, long after.

The conversation of the gods! - I didn't resent or feel aggrieved because I couldn't understand it. I was the smallest of the planets, and if I carried messages between them and I couldn't always understand, that was in order too: they were something in a foreign language - star-talk.

Well, they don't talk to me very much, I said. You see, they're all grown up, and they have grown-up games like whist and lawn tennis, and talking, you know, just for the sake of talking (this seemed a strange pursuit to me).

Mr. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking. Here is an unmistakable talent unashamed of making itself a motley to the view. The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.

The future was to be a laborious business.

Shut the windows, draw the curtains, keep the rumour out!

Even the most impassioned devotee of the ghost story would admit that the taste for it is slightly abnormal, a survival, perhaps, from adolescence, a disease of deficiency suffered by those whose lives and imaginations do not react satisfactorily to normal experience and require an extra thrill

But I was not so much interested in facts themselves as in the importance they had for my imagination. I was passionately interested in railways, and in the relative speed of the fastest express trains; but I did not understand the principle of the steam engine and had no wish to learn.

And everyone assured him that he would never be a man until he learned how to drive. Indeed, the future was already dull and menacing with the ambitions other people entertained on his behalf.

He was surrounded by tyrants who thought they had a right to order him about: it was a conspiracy. He could not call his soul his own.

I was no longer satisfied with the small change of experience, which had hitherto contented me. I wanted to deal in larger sums.

The civilian world was a dull place, a tired three-piece orchestra, waiting for the word 'fun'.

Why do you like Hugh better? Because he is a Viscount?' 'Well, that's one reason,' I admitted, without any false shame. Respect for degree was in my blood and I didn't think of it as snobbery.

My dream had become my reality: my old life was a discarded husk.