Greenbanks Quotes

“Marriage or no marriage, children or no children, life - the real life - is lived in the spirit, and I hold that the right education helps the spirit to maintain its own life, makes it independent of material prosperity or adversity. That is the ideal we strive for. To enrich the spirit, to enrich the personality.”
― Dorothy Whipple, Greenbanks

“She had never thought she would let a daughter of hers go away like this. But what could she do? Children grew up; they pleased themselves; they grew in power to go their own ways as you diminished in power to prevent them.”
― Dorothy Whipple, Greenbanks

“Letty wanted to know every detail of Laura's going. As she asked and listened, her heart beat uncomfortably fast and she felt that, if she did not take care, she would burst into tears. Laura had gone; she had broken away.

'It's not fair! It's not fair!' Letty cried to herself. Laura had got what she wanted; whatever happened to her afterwards she had got, once, what she wanted. She had had the courage to take it.

'Not that I ever wanted to go off with a man,' Letty had thought on the way to Greenbanks with Ambrose. No, she had never seen anyone she wanted to go off with. When she thought of going, it was never with a man. Once she had indulged in wild dreams. For years after she was married she felt that someone would one day come, someone she could love with all her heart, with that high, free elation and that deep satisfaction she could imagine. She would be able to share everything with him; her fears in the night about loneliness, death, the end of things. He would understand, she felt, but he would not explain, for after all there is no explanation. He would laugh, too, at what she laughed at; he would enjoy shop incidents, tram incidents, street incidents - all the queer, funny things that go to make up every day. Letty felt, for years, that someone like this would come before it was too late.

'It's not really me, having the children and living with Ambrose,' she would think in bewilderment. 'This isn't my life really; it will all be different soon. I shall begin to live as I want to - soon.'

But the years went on and now she was over forty and looked for nobody to rescue her as if she were a damsel in distress. She no longer expected to be loved by any man. Men wanted youth and beauty; no matter how old and ugly they were themselves, they felt entitled to youth and beauty in women. She had missed the great love she had dreamed of as a girl, but she thought about it no more. Her wishes had changed as she grew older; she now only wanted to get away by herself, to enjoy life in her own way. [...] She knew what she wanted, but could not have; it was freedom.”
― Dorothy Whipple, Greenbanks

“It was May now and the weather was fine and warm. Louisa persuaded Kate into the garden, drawing her attention to the tulips and the irises, the acrobatic blue-tits on their ropes of monkey-nuts, to the song of the thrush in the evening, to this and that, mutely reminding her that whatever happened there was always the garden and the sun, the trees and the birds. One's own spiritual consolations, she felt obscurely, were not much use to other people; each soul had to find its own way. She was too diffident to proffer her own treasures but she proffered the common treasures of life to Kate.”
― Dorothy Whipple, Greenbanks

“Children make parents as wretched as parents make children; but children do not really believe that. They can't understand how it is that those whom they take for tyrants can be hurt by the victims of the tyranny.”
― Dorothy Whipple, Greenbanks

“All physical love was ugly, she told herself; all - her own, too. She was humiliated at having giving way to it again, humiliated to the earth to have been repulsed. She pressed her knuckles hard against her lips and moaned to herself.

Oh, he was right, he was right to deny the body. It brought the soul low, it degraded, it betrayed. She had finished with it [...]. Never again would she let love move her to warmth; never would she put out a hand to another living creature!

[...] Well, she would conquer her [body] once more. She would tear this love out of her heart, steel herself, and go on, as she had done before - but not here. Not in this house, under these observing eyes, no matter how kind. The kinder the eyes, the more she resented them. Kindness meant interference; and, if no one was kind, no one intruded into her isolation and she could keep on her way with a grim satisfaction at being able to do without everything that made up the happiness of other people. The lust for saying 'no' grew and flourished when she fed it daily; it could dominate her now as it had dominated it before.”
― Dorothy Whipple, Greenbanks