48 Quotes by L.P. Hartley

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

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.

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

He seldom spoke his thoughts and still more rarely, and then only in anger, did he speak his feelings, because to expose them made him feel naked, and worse than naked—flayed.

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

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

   "Will you, as they say, say when?" he asked, standing at Eustace's elbow with the whisky decanter and a glass.   "Stop, stop I've got to sit up and do some work when I get back."   "Work, work, the word is always on your lips, Eustace, but I never see you doing any, I'm glad to say."   "I put it away when you come, of course," said Eustace. "I take it out when Hilda comes."   "I think I shall send for her."   

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

My father was, I suppose, a crank. He had a fine, precise mind which ignored what it was not interested in. Without being a misanthrope he was unsociable and non-conforming. He had his own unorthodox theories of education, one of which was that I should not be sent to school.