Four Frightened People Quotes

“He looked away, and suddenly it was hard to attend to what he said, every muscle of the turned throat, the set of the arm in the loose shoulder next me, the lines of mouth and chin outlined against the grey-green forest background, took on an enormous, inexpressible significance for me. All the desires of the flesh, knowing its own transience, was in these things, and the unending pain and joy of human longing wore for a moment the garment of our tried, weary bodies, burning them into a new semblance, as doomed vessels of immortality.”
― E. Arnot Robertson, Four Frightened People

“Maternity is a totally ungracious thing, beneath the sentimentality heaped upon it. Only once have I seen it made beautiful for an instant, by a chance grouping of a woman's thick white thigh, statuesque in its rigidity, and the new-born child lying in the arch made by her raised knee, with its arm thrown back above its head, and the strangest expression of peace that I have ever seen on the face of a living child. The cord was not yet cut, stretching in an arc between them. For a second I was staggered by such unexpected loveliness as they showed together, and then I bent over them to help her, and the scene changed back instantly to a normal birth, which is generally uglier than death, only so much pleasanter to witness than one rarely realizes it.”
― E. Arnot Robertson, Four Frightened People

“This is love, to my thinking: not the endowing of another person with alien beauty - I never considered Arnold Ainger as good-looking as Stewart, who was himself nothing out of the ordinary - but the flowering into significance of their most ordinary attributes, as wonderful as the putting on of leaves by a bare tree: so that it would be sacrilege to credit them with more loveliness than they possess, for the marvel is that they exist, just as they are.”
― E. Arnot Robertson, Four Frightened People

“It is extraordinary how much wretchedness a human heart can ingeniously contrive to hold at any one time.”
― E. Arnot Robertson, Four Frightened People

“I could say nothing, being sickened suddenly, through the realization of another woman's misery, by the old fret and weariness of spirit from which I had been freer of late, the resentment felt, I think, by most unhappy imaginative people at the uselessness of all suffering. It is a selfless jealousy of wretchedness, this feeling that though life brings forth so much sadness, and one's own is so small a part of the sumo sorrow, still it is enough to fill the whole earth with its helpless longings: why must the sorrows of so many others be added to a world surcharged, it seems, with one's own pain? To all who suffer angrily in mind, not only in heart, the bitterest part of this waste of spirit which is human pain is the knowledge that it is futile, without value either to the sufferer or to others.”
― E. Arnot Robertson, Four Frightened People

“Here, day was not the decorous successor to night known to us at home, lazily resuming sway over a drowsy world when the darkness thins and dies, bequeathing its lost kingdom to the unwilling light. This struggling, sun-born life in forest, swamp and teeming air was too urgent and too ephemeral to wait for the going of night before resuming its unchanging day-labor of growth, fruition and exhaustion once more. Day extended its reign into the darkness, stealing precious time from the night, and when the sky paled perceptibly at last the feeling of full day was already abroad on this impatient earth.”
― E. Arnot Robertson, Four Frightened People