The Time of Man Quotes

“The ground and the air were as nothing to her, for all her life had been plucked out and there was nothing left but the knowledge that it had been taken away.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“how did she, Ellen Chesser, ever come to such a state of need that a person outside herself, some other being, not herself, some person free to go and come and risk accidents far from herself, should hold the very key to her life and breath in his hand?”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“Voices beat on her memory but they made hollow meaningless noises. Something that came to nothing went on and on. ‘Open the gate, Ellen!’ It was nothing but sound running up and down. What for? What for? On and on. Thus until sleep, the comforter spoke, running gentle hands down her tired nerves and sad thought. ‘It’s no knowen how lovely I am. I’m a-liven. My heart beats on and on and my skin laps around me and my blood runs up and it runs down, shut in me. It’s unknowen how lovely.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“The rocks fell where she laid them with a faint flat sound, and the afternoon seemed very still back of the dove calls and the cries of the plovers, back of a faint dying phrase, ‘in the time of man’.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“All the signs of the autumn came, the heavy plush-like asters, buck-berries and frost-flowers, everlasting and chicory – all the last tokens of the living year. The mockingbird would sing a few notes, reminiscent of spring after the quiet of the late summer, and on moonlight nights the cocks would crow all night long. Ellen bought a fresh ribbon for her dress and a bit of lace for her throat and blossomed anew with the frostweeds and the last of the chicory that lingered far into October. The abundance of autumn was again in the air, the summary of the growing season.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“You could learn that too in books, it’s said. I got a heap of books to read and ne’er a one have I read yet but two or maybe three. You could never read all the books in the world, I reckon, if you read all your days until you’re old.’ ‘I don’t aim to get old. I wouldn’t. Grow up is all I aim.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“Here’s how Granny looks,’ Melissy said, sucking in her lips to look toothless. ‘Here’s Granny.’ ‘Shame to you,’ Ellen said. ‘I’ll whip you and whip hard if I hear you make fun of your granny. Don’t let me hear e’er one of you make fun of your granny or your grandpap either. Granny, she’s old. It’s a shame to make fun of old folks. You’ll be old yourself some day.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“The year began to turn, a form moving lightly upon itself, but she minded nothing of the year, for her body had changed, and the hoe and the soil now cut each other sharply, visible and near. ‘Jonas,’ she said, over and over. It was a name, that was all, a name for something that was gone.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“With the first recognition of their fixity came a faint recognition of those structures which seemed everlasting and undiminished within herself, recurring memories, feelings, responses, wonder, worship, all gathered into one final inner motion which might have been called spirit; this gathered with another, an acquired structure, fashioned out of her experience of the past years, out of her passions and the marks put upon her by the passions of others, this structure built up now to its high maturity. There was no name to come to her lips in this moment of faint recognition, a moment which dispersed itself in an emotion, for the word Jonas had been denied her, had been subtracted from the emotion it had caused and signified and with which it had been made one for many reasons. She stood very still on the top of the rise,”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“She lay there all the day, falling out of her deep sleep into a hurt dream now and then but gathering back into nothingness and numbness in the end.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“Then Mammy she told Pap he better bury it and Newt buried it when he went to dig a post hole one time. It was a small-like skull and might be a woman or a youngone half growed up, and then after a spell we heared that a man killed his boy in the house away back, man drunk and killed his own boy about twelve year old and they buried him out in the field. War time, it was. Said there was blood on the floor up in the loft room where the boy died, and sure enough there was, when you looked sharp, a brown spot on the floor but you couldn’t say on oath it was blood.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“I opened up my dinner bucket the whole place was lined with these-here little brown ants, all gaumed into the dinner.’ ‘What did you do?’ Ellen asked. ‘How’d you get shed of them?’ ‘I reckon I didn’t eat my dinner that-there day. I never could abide to have ants in my victuals. A man over by Coulter’s sawmill said once, “Law, ants is such clean little things, I never take notice to an ant.” A woman over at grandpap’s said once she never ate blackberry jam because it was made in flytime. Said if you ever took notice to it blackberry jam was about half flies cooked up and most people never knowed the difference. The taste was about the same, she said. She said she never ate jam on that account.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“But often the storm raged, sleet or wind or heavy snow, and Jonas did not come for several weeks at a time. The coldest winter in years, men said, the coldest in the time of man.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“I recall how upset Josie was. Ready to gouge and fight that-there time over at Bethel Church.’ ‘A man’s that got it in head to own a place… got get-up in his hide… Beyond that under their shirts they’re all just alike. In the dark you couldn’t know one from the next.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“They were five shapes lying beyond herself, herself forgotten, five shapes, one of them carrying a light, a deep voice, a high voice, and muffled words, now reached up and now bent down in sweet arcs, in high bridges suddenly flung across chasms of thought, in little down-drooping sayings, low and final. All of them were beautiful to her in their closeness, their offered friendship. She walked home in silence, forgetting to speak. They were tired after the long merry evening, and their weariness made them speak gently.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“Too eager to wait for supper, Ellen brushed back her hair before the kitchen mirror, put on her cloak, and ran away toward Dorine Wheatley’s home where there was to be a party. Her head was bare in the frosty night and her hair caught the vigour of the air und crisped richly over her forehead. Her dark skirt had been brushed that afternoon and her waist inspected for holes and loose buttons. Her shoes had been viewed in several moods, critically, hopelessly, hopefully, carelessly, mournfully, but in all moods they were old and worn.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“Hearing the high thin cries in the autumn Ellen would remember the one time when she had met Miss Amanda on a path. Her bright cotton dress had come flashing in the way and she had walked quickly by, without a greeting, her mouth lifted into a bent smile and her eyes slanting away as if she said, ‘I don’t care!’ Even in her denial she added to the increasing richness of the farms.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“this girl before and they told each other their names. The richness of the autumn came into the air, the throb of the engine, the abundance of the farm, the hickory nuts which she offered to the girl and which her thin hands took. She was Dorine Wheatley. ‘We moved into MacMurtrie’s tenant house a while back,’ she said. ‘Are there any parties around here? Any fellows to have a good time with?”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“I’m old. I’m so old I’m about done with liven. I can feel how old I am. I’m old and old and old. I’ve been in life a long, long time. Oh, how old I am.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“People knowing her, having her in their thoughts, saying things to her, coupling her acts with their acts – ‘Take the calves in as soon as Ellen gets through.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“In a week, however, the strangeness was gone, and when she crumbled pepper bread by the pond at noon the hens came with their speckled broods that cried ‘pee pee pee’. There were five or six hens, each with fifteen or twenty chicks. Ellen’s orders came from Ben who conveyed messages from Miss Tod. ‘Was the old bronze hen a good mother?’ She must be sure to keep the drinking pans clean. Going about her labours Ellen carried pepper bread in her apron pocket and she would give some of this to the chicks whenever she met them.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“No need for you to think about something pink to wear or something blue or yellow. No use to think about soft colours. You might as well wear one kind as another. Drab. Brown. Faded dark old shrunk-up anything is good enough. Why don’t you just give up and be ugly? That’s what you are. Ugly. That’s all.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“I’m ugly,’ she said, ‘and I might as well know it and remember. My hands are big and coarse and my skin is browned and redded in the wind. My eyes are slow and big, always a-looken at everything in the world and always expecten to see something more. My face looks like the ground and my back looks like ground with my old cloak pulled over it. I’m ugly. My hands, they’re ugly and my feet have got on big old shoes. My feet are like roots of trees. I look like a board and I look like a rough old pond in a pig pasture. I’ll remember. I’m ugly. Ugly. I’m ugly in the way I walk; sometimes a-goen fast and sometimes slow, scared-like.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“No plough iron ever cut this-here hill afore, not in the whole time of man,’ Henry said.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“I never see any grow. I never see one a-growen.’ ‘I never see one a-growen neither, but they grow all the same. You pick up all the rocks offen this-here hill and in a year there’s as many out again. I lay there’ll be a stack to pick up right here again next year.’ ‘I can’t seem to think it! Rocks a-growen now! They don’t seem alive. They seem dead-like. Maybe they’ve got another kind of way to be alive.’ ‘Maybe they have. All I know is they grow.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“Ellen chopped the wood at the woodpile in the yard and she carried water from an old well in the rear of the pasture. She was afraid to pass beyond the ways allotted to her by her labours, and so the region beyond the pond stood off as a picture, unexplored”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“The plan succeeded very well, and she followed it all summer, but she lost the shaded ravine and the upper creek as a pleasant place to go, and she bathed no more in the water. The white stones and the moss stones of the furthest creek became beautiful in memory. The name, Joe Trent, went out of her being slowly. For weeks the mention of it brought a first flush of warmth to her mind and a gentle flow of momentary joy to all her members. ‘Friend’ lay in thought with the word, ‘Somebody I might know all my life. A body to tell things to.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“Before autumn Ellen was fifteen. During the summer there had always been food and she had grown less thin. Her bones had withdrawn under the flesh and her eyes were no longer hollow. Signs of woman begun to appear on her meagre body; woman took possession of her although she was hard like spines and sharp like flint. She looked at herself in the mirror of the creek, for she dared not unrobe herself in the house before the eyes of her mother.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“The farm was beautiful and secure, running up over a hill and lapping into a ravine, spreading flat over the lower pasture. It was there, in place, reaching about into hollows and over uplands, theirs to live in and to know and to work.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man

“The woman had been seen now a half-dozen times and had become a mass of characteristic motions and friendly staring eyes. Ellen longed to fix her into a thought, to know what she would say now that she knew how she would look saying it. She longed to find her out, to like her or to hate her.”
― Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man