The Auction Sale Quotes

“I don't think we need be afraid of it. It is this capacity for change which gives us our second chances. Without it, we might have to worry whether the imperfections, particularly those which are due to some fault in ourselves, might not be with us for ever.”
― C.H.B. Kitchin, The Auction Sale

“But remember, if you can, your own past sufferings and pain, and how when they were over and you looked back on them, they seemed mere episodes—stepping-stones towards convalescence, lovers' quarrels which show the reality of love. Suppose you are looking at an old diary and come across a date when you were beside yourself with terror about something which was then in the future, wouldn't you, while remembering your fears, smile at them a little with the fuller knowledge you now have?”
― C.H.B. Kitchin, The Auction Sale

“I don't want you to go away feeling too hopeless about the past. It isn't lost."

"That's what I try to tell myself, but it isn't always easy to believe."

"No, it isn't, particularly when one's mind is agitated by the turmoil of the present, or distressed by fears for the future. But the past isn't lost—it's as real as our immortality. It is our immortality in a sense, since the best in it forms the ground-work of our future.”
― C.H.B. Kitchin, The Auction Sale

“When we have to bear some dreadful calamity, we are supposed—aren't we?—to ask ourselves why it has been sent to us and what lesson we can learn from it, and what we have done to deserve it. But we take happiness for granted, as we take a fine day. Perhaps that is part of the nature of happiness—that it needs no probing or examining. It doesn't carry a lesson, like a sting in its tail. It's just there, and that is more than enough.”
― C.H.B. Kitchin, The Auction Sale

“It is difficult enough to leave this world, but to leave it, alone and full of fears, with no hand holding yours and clinging to yours throughout that strange new journey—that is too much.”
― C.H.B. Kitchin, The Auction Sale

“I can't do with all that being taken from me. I can't do with a new world. There's no such thing as a new world. Each person has his own, which opens out like a flower, full of fragrance and beauty, and—then perhaps runs to seed and dies, as each person dies. But must it die? May it not be real always? If truth lies in ideas, and even more in feelings...”
― C.H.B. Kitchin, The Auction Sale

“Miss Elton, who found the conversation increasingly distressing, got up, murmured a quick good night . . . and went to her room.

During the bellicose talk in the lounge, the ghosts of Frank Durrant, Madeleine, Arvid and Mr. Sorenius seemed to be slipping further and further away with their own receding world. And what was one offered in exchange for this world of the dead? A future in which all signposts pointed to war and the ruin of all those useless little things which made life worth living.

And then, as if provoked by the contrast of the speeches and ideas to which she had just been listening, a flood of images, each of them a small part of her life at Ashleigh Place, swept through her mind with an overwhelming suddenness—a walk on a windy autumn afternoon to the farm with a message about eggs, cartloads of logs coming before Christmas to be stacked in the stables, the remodelling of the rose-garden, with Mrs. Durrant setting the new labels in their places, two swans which spent a season on the little River Mene at the foot of the western slope, and the sudden appearance of a kingfisher by those fitful waters, the endless cooing of wood-pigeons in the trees round the house, the catch whistled by the baker's boy as he jumped out of his bright little van, the tick of the huge grandfather clock in the darkest corner of the hall, the pattern of the old-fashioned tiles in the bathroom which she had used, cockchafers beating against the windows on hot summer nights, the scent of the tobacco plants in the round bed near the drawing-room, an expedition to the woods on a grey day to cut mistletoe. . . .”
― C.H.B. Kitchin, The Auction Sale