The Uninvited Quotes

“In the city so much of your life is lived for you by others; you are required to fill so small a space. But here, as it were, the spirit has play in a more spacious body, and that is better, if the spirit is rich and strong.”
― Dorothy Macardle, The Uninvited

“They subordinate the whole to the part. It is no longer life they are celebrating, nor nature, but some crude, fanatical party creed. I am afraid that doing things for their own sake will soon be a luxury for children and perhaps for freaks like you and me.”
― Dorothy Macardle, The Uninvited

“Like many people who have active imaginations and dream a good deal she is a morning sluggard and likes to breakfast in her room.”
― Dorothy Macardle, The Uninvited

“For a minute the whole scene quivered, then I saw it clear, in the pure, strong colours of childhood, as if a gap had been torn here in some veil that dulls the world to older eyes.”
― Dorothy Macardle, The Uninvited

“The workers of the world will never recognise writers,”
― Dorothy Macardle, The Uninvited

“On Sunday night and again on Tuesday we were both out of bed, exploring and listening. We had begun to distrust the evidence of our senses, feel our hearts lurch at shadows, and take every murmur of winds and waves for a supernatural sound. The”
― Dorothy Macardle, The Uninvited

“She smiled at me, but I could not respond. I was filled with foreboding. An hour ago all had been well; we had stood together on the edge of immeasurable happiness, but now something dark and chilling had fallen between us – a shadow out of the past. I ought never to have brought Stella to this house. I”
― Dorothy Macardle, The Uninvited

“I think that school of yours sounds stuffy. Weren’t you glad to leave it?’ ‘I was! Especially at first.’ ‘Then you began to feel that Biddlecombe is too far from the world?’ ‘Exactly! Is that silly? Because, where is the world? We were in the world at your party, weren’t we? I expect you are in the world wherever you go.’ ‘Look here,’ I asked her, ‘how much do you want to come to Cliff End?’ She”
― Dorothy Macardle, The Uninvited

“We are all poor sinful creatures, and the wiser we grow, the harder it is for us to avoid falling into sin. I sometimes envy the very simple.’ He smiled at Pamela and pressed her hand. ‘Try not to worry, my child! You may become accustomed to these little disturbances, or they may cease. I will pray for you. If you need my help, send for me: at any hour, day or night, I will come, and remember, the Church has had centuries of experience in quieting such troubles. And now I will talk to Lizzie, if you please.’ We”
― Dorothy Macardle, The Uninvited

“What a pity that one forgets!’ she said. ‘No,’ I replied tersely, ‘it is one of nature’s best dispensations. You should be living in the future, not in the past.’ ‘But,”
― Dorothy Macardle, The Uninvited

“A phrase Max had used bothered me. I was not to be surprised if my work underwent a change. I might find it becoming more creative. What the hell had Max meant by that? What was wrong with my work as it was? Fiddling journalism; nothing sustained about it; conventional, facile, all on the sound old traditional lines? No doubt that was how he saw it: did he suppose I had not seen that too? Why else had I undertaken the book? And what was the book, anyway, but a compilation, a re-hash of old newspaper articles better forgotten – no more ‘creative’ than Pamela’s scrap-books. And even that I hadn’t the capacity to finish. It would never be finished. I saw that now. It would not be finished because I had nothing to say. What I had mistaken for talent had been no more than the afflatus which makes every second swelled-headed adolescent suppose he has a vocation to write. It was a folly which had made me turn my back on the chance of a solid profession, got me as far as a sub-editor’s desk on a London weekly, and led me to walk out from that into the blue. I had imagined that I had something to say, and behold, without the drive of a play to report on, a book to review, or a controversy to join in, I was empty: I dredged into my own mind and found nothing there. My youthful energy was already exhausted. I was finished: finished at thirty. And Max had seen that. I”
― Dorothy Macardle, The Uninvited

“Pamela’s prescription was simple: give the summer mornings to Cliff End, then, in September, go full blast at the book. Specious, but I knew too well that the longer the respite the more painful would be the labour of a fresh start. I began to fear that I might never be able to take up this book again. I was afraid that I might be undergoing one of those periods of transition on which Clement Forster used to dilate. Your entire outlook on life changes, he declared; you grow a new mind, and you have as little use for your former style and ideas as for your out-grown clothes. You’ve got to discover a new writing personality in yourself. I had actually watched something of the sort taking place in him, and it did him good: he got rid of a lot of sentimentality; developed realism, humour, and poise. All very fine in journalism, but it would be awkward if that sort of thing were to happen in the middle of a book. There”
― Dorothy Macardle, The Uninvited