The Squire Quotes

“The children seemed to cast their Precursors like shadows about the house, sometimes tangibly, in the sound of a voice, sometimes by suggestion, because it was striking the hour for their return from a walk, sometimes mysteriously, because inside the shell of their mother's head the children were painted like angels on the roof of a chapel.”
― Enid Bagnold, The Squire

“Can you understand when I tell you that you owe me nothing? That to have a child is an account which is settled on the spot”
― Enid Bagnold, The Squire

“While the squire pulled out a flat weed she was beside herself with pity for humanity. This short, this fearful loveliness, in which men and women, heroic and baffled, struggling to wisdom, age as they struggle; wrestle upwards and drop into the ground. This marriage, this association, with matter, what a high-handed experiment, but what admirable victims! Man, with his eye on death, draws his foot from the womb. There is not time for anything, yet there is time for everything. No sooner appreciate love than skin withers, no sooner grow wise than we are unfit for wisdom. Learning to live and defeated by death. Discovery succeeds discovery, and nothing accumulates. We live haunted. We grasp and grasp; what we hold dissolves, our very hands dissolve.”
― Enid Bagnold, The Squire

“There is nothing so difficult to remember as sexual love. How often, where, and what happened? It all goes, it has all gone, leaving no impression, mattering so much less than we like to think. (…)
What we have had we have had, and, pleased, we pass along. (But what we haven't had may well be a ticklish business!)”
― Enid Bagnold, The Squire

“He's old now. He goes about gathering up the women who loved him and getting a kick out of their consternation and vague distress. He whips up what they once felt and hopes to make it foam. He tries his foot on his own immortality and there the ice is thin and lets him through.”
― Enid Bagnold, The Squire

“She saw herself alone, alive and doomed, strong and helpless, passing in a line of women, her mother before her, the child Lucy, behind, women walking on a temple frieze, Greek women in fluttering robes rounding a vase's girth for ever.”
― Enid Bagnold, The Squire

“They went together to the pond. The frogs, frozen by the movement, sat still. Fourteen golden eyes like nuggets gleamed unwinking from the margin. Some squatted on dead reeds and immersed branches. Tranced by the half-apprehended movement above them they relied for safety upon immobility. Some hung by one slim hand like children to a raft. All had been stricken to stone by the human appearance. Only the sun, shifting in the sky, tickled the fire in the nuggets in their green heads.”
― Enid Bagnold, The Squire

“At midnight when the fire had burnt down, and leaving the door wide open that she might have the lights behind her, she went through the dark hall, drew back the bolts of the front door and took her letters to the post.
The village green outside was white with moonlight. As she stepped on to it it seemed a deck, her village ship a-sail on the slant of the world. The unknown and impersonal companion within her turned with a gulp, emitted a bubble of wind and revolved in its pond.
"Do you never sleep?" she enquired aloud of her belly. The hemispheres whirled above the stillness, stars shone; down at human level the lamp in the churchyard gate was still as a star.”
― Enid Bagnold, The Squire

“But now, at the table, behind the fall of the tablecloth, behind the sheath of skin, hanging head downwards between cliffs of bone, was the baby, its arms all but clasped about its neck, its face aslant upon its arms, hair painted upon its skull, closed, secret eyes, a diver poised in albumen, ancient and epic, shot with delicate spasms, as old as Pharaoh in its tomb.”
― Enid Bagnold, The Squire

“I know I feel like Gulliver sometimes, weighed down by little men. There are so many people in this house, I'm a queen bee, with every muscle dragging. I'm the heart of a cluster, black, dripping, sucking, hanging.”
― Enid Bagnold, The Squire

“Suddenly, as they walked with their buckets, it was not the child in each face that she sought, but the Wonder that had raised itself on to its two feet, that had learnt to walk, to run, that had spoken, that had got in touch with life under her hand.”
― Enid Bagnold, The Squire

“In a strange way', she thought, 'these absences suit my nature though not my heart. I love him, I miss him, but I have time to put on my humanity again.”
― Enid Bagnold, The Squire