Quotes from Earnest Poole

And there came to him a feeling which he had often had before in many different places--that he himself was a part of all this, the great, blind, wistful soul of mankind, which had been here before he was born and would be here when he was dead--still groping, yearning, struggling upward, on and on--to something distant as the sun. And still would he be part of it all, through the eager lives of his children.

He saw each of his daughters, part of himself. And he remembered what Judith had said: 'You will live on in our children's lives.' And he began to get glimmerings of a new immortality, made up of generations, an endless succession of other lives extending into the future.

It's hard to keep up with your children,' he said. 'It means keeping up with everything new. And you stay in your rut and then it's too late. Before you know it you are old.

I wonder if it won't be the same with the children as it has been with us. No matter how long each one of them lives, won't their lives feel to them unfinished like ours, only just beginning? I wonder how far they will go. And then their children will grow up and it will be the same with them. Unfinished lives. Oh, dearie, what children all of us are.

He had thought of childhood as something intimate and pure, inside his home, his family. Instead of that, in Deborah's school he had been disturbed and thrilled by the presence all around him of something wild, barbaric, dark, compounded of the city streets, of surging crowds, of rushing feet, of turmoil, filth, disease and death, of poverty and vice and crime.

When the women get the vote, we'll spend more money on the children.