The Dweller on the Threshold Quotes

“lifted his cup, and drank the rest of his coffee. "May I have another cup?" he said. "It's excellent." The coffee-pot was on the table. Chichester poured out some more. "I will have another cup, too," he said. "How it wakes up the mind.”
― Robert Smythe Hichens, The Dweller on the Threshold

“the soldiers starting out vaguely from barracks, not knowing what to do, but free for a time, and hoping, a little heavily, for some adventure to break the military monotony of their lives; the shopgirls, also in hope of something to "take them out of themselves"—pathetic desire of escape from the little prison, where the soul sits, picking its oakum sometimes, in its cell of flesh!—young men making for the parks, workmen for the public houses, an old woman, in a cap, peering out of an upper window in Prince's Gate; Italians with an organ, and a monkey that looked as if it were dying of nostalgia; women hurrying—whither?—with anxious faces, and bodies whose very shapes, and whose every movement, suggested, rather proclaimed, worry.”
― Robert Smythe Hichens, The Dweller on the Threshold

“in the evening rain fell with a gentle persistence. Blank grayness took the town. A breath as of deep autumn was in the air. And the strange sadness of cities, which is like no other sadness, held the spirit of Evelyn Malling as he walked under an umbrella in the direction of Kensington High Street.”
― Robert Smythe Hichens, The Dweller on the Threshold

“It is one of the curses of the Church," continued Chichester, "this passion for authority, for ruling, for having all men under one's feet as it were.”
― Robert Smythe Hichens, The Dweller on the Threshold

“Evidently Mr. Harding had attractive powers, and Malling began to wonder whether he would have any difficulty in obtaining the seat he wanted, in some corner from which he could get a good view both of the chancel and the pulpit. Were vergers "bribable"? What an ignoramus he was about church matters!”
― Robert Smythe Hichens, The Dweller on the Threshold

“The sadness noted by Malling was at first evasive and fleeting, not indellibly fixed in the puckers of a forehead, or in the down-drawn corners of a mouth. It was as a thin, almost impalpable mist, that can scarcely be seen, yet that alters all the features in a landscape ever so faintly.”
― Robert Smythe Hichens, The Dweller on the Threshold