L P Hartley Quotes

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.

You flew too near the sun and you were scorched.

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

Yes, the past is a foreign country," I said, "but some of us are full-fledged citizens, others occasional tourists, and some floating itinerants, itching to get out yet always aching to return." "There's a life that takes place in ordinary time," I said, "and another that bursts in but just as suddenly fizzles out. And then there's the life we may never reach but that could so easily be ours if only we knew how to find it. It doesn't necessarily happen on our planet, but is just as real as the one we live by—call it our 'star life.' Nietzsche wrote that estranged friends may become declared enemies but in some mysterious way continue to remain friends, though on a totally different sphere. He called these 'star friendships.

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

If my twelve-year-old self, of whom I had grown rather fond, thinking about him, were to reproach me: 'Why have you grown up such a dull dog, when I gave you such a good start? Why have you spent your time in dusty libraries, catologuing other people's books instead of writing your own? What had become of the Ram, the Bull and the Lion, the example I gave you to emulate? Where above all is the Virgin, with her shining face and curling tresses, whom I entrusted to you'- what should I say? I should have an answer ready. 'Well, it was you who let me down, and I will tell you how. You flew too near to the sun, and you were scorched. This cindery creature is what you made me.' To which he might reply: 'But you have had half a century to get over it! Half a century, half the twentieth century, that glorious epoch, that golden age that I bequeathed to you!' 'Has the twentieth century,' I should ask, 'done so much better than I have? When you leave this room, which I admit is dull and cheerless, and take the last bus to your home in the past, if you haven't missed it - ask yourself whether you found everything so radiant as you imagined it. Ask yourself whether it has fulfilled your hopes. You were vanquished, Colston, you were vanquished, and so was your century, your precious century that you hoped so much of.

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.

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 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.

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).

I should not have cared to see it as an act of self-sacrifice even if it had been one; for there is nothing clever in self-sacrifice, nothing to pride oneself on.

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

The future was to be a laborious business.

To bleed from many wounds may be more serious than to bleed from one, but the pain, being less localized, is also easier for the mind to bear.

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

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.

No, I thought, growing more rebellious, life has its own laws and it is for me to defend myself against whatever comes along, without going snivelling to God about sin, my own or other people's. How would it profit a man if he got into a tight place, to call he people who put him there miserable sinners? Or himself a miserable sinner? I disliked the levelling aspect of this sinnerdom, it was like a cricket match played in a drizzle, where everybody had an excuse - and what a dull excuse! - for playing badly. Life was meant to test a man, bring out his courage, initiative, resource; and I longed, I thought, to be tested: I didn't want to fall on my knees and call myself a miserable sinner. But the idea of goodness did attract me, for I did not regard it as the opposite of sin. I saw it as something bright and positive and sustaining, like the sunshine, something to be adored, but from afar.

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.

The past is a foreign country.” —L. P. Hartley

I could see Marian's fingers at work, catch the gleam of her white arms and whiter neck , and imagine not one, but a whole series of deaths which i should die for her.

The past is another country. They do things differently there.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

No little boy likes to be called a little man, but any little boy likes to be treated as a little man, and this is what Marian had done for me: at times, and when she had wanted to, she had endowed me with the importance of a grown-up; she had made me feel that she depended on me. She, more than anyone, had puffed me up.

What did we talk about that has left me with an impression of wings and flashes, as of air displaced by the flight of a bird? Of swooping and soaring, of a faint iridescence subdued to the enfolding brightness of the day?

But what I heard was a low insistent murmur, with pauses for reply in which no reply was made. It had a hypnotic quality that I had never heard in any voice: a blend of urgency, cajolery, and extreme tenderness, and with below it the deep vibrato of a held-in laugh that might break out at any moment. It was the voice of someone wanting something very much and confident of getting it, but at the same time willing, no, constrained, to plead for it with all the force of his being.

It was delicious to be praised. A sense of luxury invaded Eustace's heart. Get on in the world...say nice things to people...he would remember that.

Nothing is ever a lady’s fault. - The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley

How little he knew about the rules of this world which he had crashed against so casually, like a moth bumping against a light!

That afternoon marked more than one change in Eustace's attitude towards life. Physical ugliness ceased to repel him and conversely physical beauty lost some of its appeal.

How terrifyingly efficient she sounds," said Stephen. "I think I should faint in her presence.

Knowledge may be power, but it is not resilience, or resourcefulness, or adaptability to life, still less is it instinctive sympathy with human nature;

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

Die Vergangenheit ist ein fremdes Land; dort gelten andere Regeln.

El pasado es un país extraño; allí hacen las cosas de manera muy diferente a como las hacemos aquí

The past,” as the British novelist L. P. Hartley wrote, “is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

With the opening of the door, and the installation of electric light in the cupboard, the skeletons had crumbled into dust.

Indeed, the life of facts proved no bad substitute for the facts of life.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. —L. P. Hartley

Nature meant his face to be expressive but he did not; for an expression is a give-away and he did not want to give anything away.

Recognition of his own value, by himself and others, was of paramount importance to the car-hire driver.

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.

The past is a foreign country— they do things differently there. L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

I disliked the levelling aspect of this sinnerdom, it was like a cricket match played in the drizzle, where everyone had an excuse - and what a dull excuse! - for playing badly. Life was meant to test a man, bring out his courage, initiative, resource; and I longed, I thought, to be tested: I did not want to fall on my knees and call myself a miserable sinner.

   "But she is very fond of you, anyone can see that."    "Oh yes, she is. They all are. But—I don't know how it is—if they see me really happy—for long together, I mean—they don't seem to like it."   

When one has made up one's mind that things are going well, and that one has helped to make them go well, it takes some time to realize that in fact the opposite is true, and that things are not going well.

Apart from work, he didn't need an outside stimulus, except that curious one of picking a quarrel. It was in hostility that his being fulfilled itself. As a soldier should be, he was sudden and fierce in quarrel.

His habitual mood was one of fearful joy contending with a ragged cloud of nervous apprehensions, and accompanying this was a train of extremely intense sensations proceeding from well-known sounds and sights and smells.

Believing himself to be unseen by other bathers, he gave himself up to being alone with his body. He wriggled his toes, breathed hard through his nose, twisted his brown moustache where some drops of water still clung, and looked himself critically all over. The scrutiny seemed to satisfy him, as well as it might. I, whose only acquaintance was with bodies and minds developing, was suddenly confronted by maturity in its most undeniable form; and I wondered, what must it feel like to be him, master of those limbs which have passed beyond the need of gym and playing field, and exist for their own beauty and strength? What can they do, I thought, to be conscious of themselves?

Her face was wet with tears. A foreigner in the world of the emotions, ignorant of their language but compelled to listen to it, I turned into the street. With every step I marvelled more at the extent of Marian's self-deception. Why then was I moved by what she had said? Why did I half wish that I could see it all as she did? And why should I go on this preposterous errand? I hadn't promised to and I wasn't a child, to be ordered about. My car was standing by the public call-box; nothing easier than to ring up Ted's grandson and make my excuses. . . . But I didn't, and hardly had I turned in at the lodge gates, wondering how I should say what I had come to say, when the south-west prospect of the Hall, long hidden from my memory, sprang into view.

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.

I did not know it by the name of passion. I did not understand the nature of the bond that drew the two together; but I understood its workings very well. I knew what they would give for it and give up for it; I knew how far they would go — I knew there were no lengths they would not go to. I realized they got something out of it I could not get: I did not realize that I was jealous of it, jealous of whatever it was they gave each other, and did not give me. But though experience could not tell me what it was, my instincts were beginning to have a clue.

Indeed, Hilda was always putting her oar in, constituting herself the voice of conscience; she was a task-mistress, leading the chorus, undefined, unrecognised, but clearly felt, of those who thought he ought to try more, do more, be more, than he had it in him to try, or do, or be.

For the first time in his life he was unable to think of himself as existing the next day. There would be a Eustace, he supposed, but it would be someone else, someone to whom things happened that he, the Eustace of to-night, knew nothing about. Already he he felt he had taken leave of the present. For a while he thought it strange that they should all talk to him about ordinary things in ordinary voices; and once when Minney referred to a new pair of sand-shoes he was to have next week he felt a shock of unreality, as though she had suggested taking a train that had long since gone.

Their conversations usually followed the same pattern: beginning with Lady Franklin and her obsession, they ended with Leadbitter and his fictitious home-life. Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies; but Lady Franklin asked a great many questions and Leadbitter told her a great many lies.

...for the first time I couldn't feel really interested in my mother's letter. The small concerns of home, instead of coming close to me and enveloping me as I read about them, remained small and far away; they were like magic lantern slides without a lantern to bring them back to life. I didn't belong there, I felt; my place was here; here I was a planet, albeit a small one, and carried messages for other planets. And my mother's harping on the heat seemed irrelevant and almost irritating; she ought to know, I felt, that I was enjoying it, that I was invulnerable to it, invulnerable to everything...

She shook her head impatiently; the idea of being in competition with other unhappy people was distasteful to her. It was an argument that her friends sometimes used, very delicately of course—that other people had more reason for grief than she had. As if grief could be measured by its causes, and not by the victim's capacity for suffering!

Suddenly I caught sight of myself in a glass and saw what a figure of fun I looked. Hitherto I had always taken my appearance for granted; now I saw how inelegant it was, compared with theirs; and at the same time, for the first time, I was acutely aware of social inferiority. I felt utterly out of place among these smart rich people, and a misfit everywhere.

And I liked Ted Burgess in a reluctant, half-admiring, half-hating way. When I was away from him I could think of him objectively as a working farmer whom no one at the Hall thought much of. But when I was with him his mere physical presence cast a spell on me, it established an ascendancy which I could not break. He was, I felt, what a man ought to be, what I should like to be when I grew up.

When I had got over the shock of this disclosure, which quite took away my powers of speech, my first impulse was to feel aggrieved. Why hadn't they told me? I might have made an even worse fool of myself. Then, with still greater force, it struck me that I ought to have known. It had been obvious from the start, too obvious. But I was like that. Two and two never made four for me, if I could make them five.

   "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."   

For a moment Eustace contemplated an existence spent in pleasing himself. How would he set about it? He had been told by precept, and had learned from experience, that the things he did to please himself usually ended in making other people grieved and angry, and were therefore wrong. Was he to spend his life in continuous wrong-doing, and in making other people cross? There would be no pleasure in that. Indeed what pleasure was there, except in living up to people's good opinion of him?

How is it, she asked herself, that every experience I have now turns to happiness — even this unhopeful one of trying to make Leadbitter enjoy the transepts? Am I entitled to it? Would Philip mind, that I can think of him and not grieve for him? Have I become heartless? Am I wicked? Is this euphoria as groundless as my depression was? — more groundless, since I then had something to feel depressed about and I have nothing, really, to feel happy about? Is it the conviction of well-being that sometimes goes before an illness?

But to them, I knew, I was a go-between, they thought of me in terms of another person. When Lord Trimingham wanted Marian, when Marian wanted Ted, they turned to me. The confidences Marian had made me had been forced out of her. With Ted it was different. He felt he owed me something - me, Leo: the tribute of one nature to another. I did not like to think of him giving up the things he cared for and sleeping on the ground. I could not believe it was softer than the beds at Brandham; besides, he might be killed. There was a lot of him to be killed, and what there was he carried about with him, it was not spread out over houses and parklands.

And the heat was a medium which made this change of out-look possible. As a liberating power with its own laws it was outside my experience. In the heat, the commonest objects changed their nature. Walls, trees, the very ground one trod on, instead of being cool were warm to the touch: and the sense of touch is the most transfiguring of all the senses. Many things to eat and drink, which one had enjoyed because they were hot, one now shunned for the same reason. Unless restrained by ice, the butter melted. Besides altering or intensifying all smells the heat had a smell of its own - a garden smell, I called it to myself, compounded of the scents of many flowers, and odours loosened from the earth, but with something peculiar to itself which defied analysis. Sounds were fewer and seemed to come from far away, as if Nature grudged the effort. In the heat the senses, the mind, the heart, the body, all told a different tale. One felt another person, one was another person.

As the much quoted lines of a novel of L. P. Hartley put it, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” I

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

A late-comer to school, I had uncritically accepted all its standards. I was a conformist: it never occurred to me that because I suffered there was something wrong with the system, or with the human heart.

The past is a dangerous country

L. P. Hartley from the 1953 novel The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country: They do things differently there.

When L.P. Hartley wrote ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there in the opening lines of his 1953 novel 'The Go-Between', he created one of the most memorable and famous opening lines in English Literature. The distant past is indeed a foreign country for any mature person considering their youth, and every one of us has an unchangeable past that looks very different now than it did then. As memories accumulate and tumble in upon each other, and unresolved, discordant issues jostle, protrude and disturb the mind’s peace, the past all too often becomes an uncomfortable, grief-littered and unwelcoming country. The past, however, might as well be set in stone as there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that we can do to shade it differently to what it actually is ... and actually was.

As L. P. Hartley famously wrote, ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’20

Almost any student of history is familiar with the truth summed up in the opening line of L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between: ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ It requires a level of naivety to imagine that a piece from a magazine published in 1916 would meet the precise social criteria of 2018. In 1916 women in Britain and America did not have the right to vote, you could still be sentenced to hard labour in prison for being gay, and an entire generation of young men were being gassed, blown-up, shot at and shelled in the fields of Flanders and France. Things were different then.

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