Lp Hartley The Go Between Quotes

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

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

...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...

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.

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.

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.