J Hartley Quotes

The only sheets I'll ever long for are my own.

What must be done must be done, whatever the price, the cost, the pain. One day we all must walk through fire.

I’ve never fully trusted people who don’t like dogs. They rarely turn out well.

It's a long ride home with nothing but me for company. I bore myself sometimes. Not often. Just now and again.

You speak as if this is a good world with a little evil in it. Rubbish. It's a hellish one where the best a man can do is put a little sanity back and look after his own.

And still you'll hesitate to tell him, won't you? Why? Because you're a woman? Is your destiny such a small thing then? To keep your legs open and your mouth shut?

Priests might divide the world into good and bad. In battle there was strong and weak and nothing else.

...the antidote to death was and always would be the heat and fury of life itself.

There are no secrets.' The thing smiled, showing a row of even, childlike teeth. 'None worth keeping. Only the ones you hide from yourself, which are the most damaging and hurtful of all. Truth is truth, and lie is lie. Tell yourself one's the other and all the world turns kilter.

You're a kid,' said Alexandra. 'There is no just about it. Only adults say just a kid and what the heck do they know about anything? Have you looked at their world lately?

Sign this... and I'll show you

I've no need of reasons. The doing's enough.' Well said for once, the girl thought. The doing was everything.

A nation's not a child, for God's sake. ... It's like a wild horse you tame by breaking it. Or a fiery woman you slap till she sees sense and warms your bed.

We spent today sending men to hell. What's more natural than to pass the night dreaming of procreating a few more to take their place?

After which, he visited the wife of that fool Wallace and spent midnight till dawn bouncing her from one end of the mattress to the other.

She was very much familiar with the Confucian saying that you have to dig two graves once you decide to seek vengeance.

Where on earth do you get a rose in Elsinore in the middle of winter?” “Don’t you want it?” She took the flower from him, kissed his cheek. No bristles. No beard. A clean-shaven man with a kind and amiable face. Scheming. She didn’t doubt it. But he was a diplomat by training. It was only to be expected. And if he’d lacked those skills perhaps neither of them would have managed Old Hamlet’s death, the marriage, the succession so easily.

The prince put the dagger on the table. “Sorry.” Yorick bent forward and looked up into his eyes. “Don’t forget our respective places here. I’m your clown. Your plaything. Your toy. Scarcely human. No need to apologise.

Woman, man, mole, maggot – they’re all the same, when all’s said and done, except for slight variations in cognitive ability. many weighty books on magic that looked as if they had been bound in human skin at the beginning of time but had probably been mass-produced last week by a factory in Catford. She fought to get away, only to find herself in the chill nursery with its tiny crib, the one her husband had carved so carefully from supple ash, the first and last thing that he ever made with his own hands. The crib rocked back and forth, and though she did not want to look inside, the dream always made her. Afterward, she woke crying, deep racking sobs that cramped her belly till she gasped with pain, surging, pulsing, wrenching stabs of agony deep as childbirth. The sleepwalking began on the second night. She woke in the kitchens rubbing her hands as if washing them, and though she could remember nothing of the dream that led her there, she skulked back to her chamber oppressed with guilt and horror. From that night on, she insisted that a lantern burn beside her bed at all hours, a talisman against darkness of all kinds. It didn’t help.

What kind of love demands the life of another? A child at that?” “Danish love, my sweet. Can’t you smell it?

Almost is such a wonderful word don’t you think?” the shopkeeper said with a wink. “So full of wiggle-room and loopholes, so not-absolutely-anything. Almost killed means still very much alive, which I am sure you will agree makes all the difference.

Magic came from within, from turning a secret key that lurked inside, waiting for the words to set it free. The

If you wanted reflections on the nature of the universe and your place in it, you should have stayed in school. You want fart noises and cock jokes, I’m your man.

And so the Scots grew restless, moaning all the time as only they could.

Suicide was a sin. It would condemn her for eternity. But so was murder, even a just one sought out of righteous grief. The revenger always dug two graves, they said. One for his victim. One for himself. She’d never understood that old saying till now. Either way she was dead.

Content,” Guildenstern agreed. “One aspires to happiness, but not too much since one would not wish to be disappointed.

Almost is such a wonderful word, don't you think?" said the shopkeeper with a wink. "So full of wiggle rom and loopholes, so not absolutely anything.

When the line is delivered, Hamlet is gazing on Yorrick's skull, casually unearthed by the gravedigger. Yorrick's fame grew out of being the line which accompanied what is perhaps the single most recognizable iconic image in literature: a man in black, considering a human skull. Show some form of that picture to most moderately educated people and plenty who aren't and they'll know that the man is Hamlet. Such things don't find their way into the popular consciousness by accident and trivial though the line may sound, it speaks to the heart of the play: a man compelled by circumstances outside of his control to confront his own mortality.

And school isn’t the same as theatre,” said Xavier, gazing round the building. “In a classroom you can talk this stuff through, interrogate it, contextualize it, and so on. You can’t do that here. There’s no pop-up footnotes to explain the subtext while the story is happening in front of you. That’s different. Makes it feel…real. Or at least endorsed: like, this is how it is and we’re not going to explain it. Study it critically by all means, talk about it, but don’t stage Othello and expect me to just sit there and drink it in, okay? Not gonna happen. Not Othello, and not The Merchant of Venice.

Ah,” I said with a bleak smile. “What was a quaint and silly folk belief becomes a major news item when white people believe in it.

Slavery comes in many guises lady. A woman should recognize that.