The Door in the Wall Quotes

“When afterwards I tried to tell my aunt, she punished me again for my wicked persistence. Then, as I said, everyone was forbidden to listen to me, to hear a word about it. Even my fairy-tale books were taken away from me for a time - because I was too 'imaginative'. Eh! Yes, they did that! My father belonged to the old school.... And my story was driven back upon myself. I whispered it to my pillow - my pillow that was often damp and salt to my whispering lips with childish tears. And I added always to my official and less fervent prayers this one heartfelt request: 'Please God I may dream of the garden. O! take me back to my garden.”
― H.G. Wells, The Door in the Wall

“By our daylight standard he walked out of security into darkness, danger, and death.
But did he see like that?”
― H.G. Wells, The Door in the Wall

“A Cabinet Minister, the responsible head of thar most vital of all departments, wandering alone - grieving - sometimes near audibly lamenting - for a door, for a garden!”
― H.G. Wells, The Door in the Wall

“Was there, after all, ever any green door in the wall at all?”
― H.G. Wells, The Door in the Wall

“. . . And then it was that in the margin of my field of vision I became aware once more of the white wall, the green door before us down the road."

“We passed it talking. I passed it. I can still see the shadow of Gurker’s marked profile, his opera hat tilted forward over his prominent nose, the many folds of his neck wrap going before my shadow and Ralphs’ as we sauntered past."

“I passed within twenty inches of the door. ‘If I say good-night to them, and go in,’ I asked myself, ‘what will happen?’ And I was all a-tingle for that word with Gurker."

“I could not answer that question in the tangle of my other problems. ‘They will think me mad,’ I thought. ‘And suppose I vanish now!—Amazing disappearance of a prominent politician!’ That weighed with me. A thousand inconceivably petty worldlinesses weighed with me in that crisis.”

Then he turned on me with a sorrowful smile, and, speaking slowly; “Here I am!” he said.

“Here I am!” he repeated, “and my chance has gone from me. Three times in one year the door has been offered me—the door that goes into peace, into delight, into a beauty beyond dreaming, a kindness no man on earth can know. And I have rejected it. . .”
― H.G. Wells, The Door in the Wall