Henry Quotes

“If I were to desert my post, I should have to start walking home, and it was a very long way, at least three miles, perhaps even farther. I had begun by hoping that, whatever else happened, Mr Butler would not appear in the road. I ended by longing for him to do so. He might be raving mad, he might be homicidal, but at least he would be company.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“Pamela stood her ground rather well. She explained that Trelynt was a nursing home as well as a Maternity Home. Mr Byways screamed that it was a lunatic asylum. He would report her to the authorities; and the whole thing began all over again.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“What you ought to do is to go straight to bed,’ Lady Merton said decisively. ‘I’m all right,’ Eric said and felt for his cigarette-case. She was turning him into an invalid and perhaps he wasn’t yet ready to be one. ‘He doesn’t want to go to bed,’ Henry said. ‘Though I must say it’s the only place in this house where one gets reasonably warm. By the way’—he turned to Eric—‘there’s a friend of yours staying in the village,’ and he told him about Stephen.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“One was rather sorry for Eric. He sat in one of Pamela’s orange armchairs and he looked solid and reliable. One supposed him to be getting on for fifty. He wore a dark blue suit, he was going a little bald, he was an historian. He didn’t look at all the sort of man who had to travel about with a private psychiatrist.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“I could live only for this afternoon, for the exact minute in time which is the present. Henry was like that too. If the present wasn’t exactly the way he wanted it, then the world was without hope.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“I was rather fond of the admirals. They’d been our great-grandfathers and -uncles; and they’d all got a piece of sea and a ship in the background. Henry said that he’d often thought how lucky it was that they’d all been painted by such terrible artists; because if any of the pictures had been valuable they’d have had to be sold. ‘Aren’t any of them worth anything?”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“I thought about Stephanie and Lawrence. I had hoped when I left Chalk Farm that they would ring me up and ask me to supper or something, but they hadn’t. I had been the lodger and now I was no longer that; I had passed out of their lives.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“Your mother had a very difficult time with your father. Your mother is a very remarkable woman. Your mother is hell.’ I was being absurd. At my age it didn’t matter what one’s mother was like; one had finished with that relationship.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“I was getting into a rut and I was not contented. I tried to look at mother and Sophia with understanding and sympathy. I tried to understand their moods. I tried to be adult about them. It was no good. Mother and Sophia irritated me.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“It was very depressing moving to mother’s. The small room at the end of the passage and do try to keep it tidy. If you leave everything on the floor it makes it so difficult for Irene. Irene was the plump young charwoman who had never known what it was to be in good service. We had never known what it was to have good servants. Sophia did most of the work of the flat in order to save Irene trouble, so Irene spent quite a restful three hours with us every morning.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“The house which had always smelt comfortably mouldy, now smelled of ether and floor polish and sometimes, just a little, of flowers. Matron and Pamela bustled where mother had walked slowly. Miss Maitland was efficient in the kitchen where Sophia had pottered. The change was complete; but to arrive at the house you still had to use the long dank drive, and, as you turned into it, you still felt it was unlikely that anyone lived at the end of it.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“Oh, no,’ I said inaccurately, ‘only about ten minutes’ walk; you keep straight on down the drive and then you turn to your left and the Pallisser Arms is almost the first house on your left.’ ‘Does it belong to you?’ ‘Not now,’ I said. ‘It used to.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“No, she isn’t dead.’ Mrs Corwell was aware that the dramatic quality of her announcement had been largely spoiled. ‘Then that’s all right.’ Mother smiled reassuringly. It seemed that she had only wanted to know if she was to add ‘Call at undertaker’s,’ to the bottom of her list.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“I’m not so sure about the convalescents,’ Matron went on. ‘Once patients get walking about they’re often more trouble than they’re worth.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“I had smiled sheepishly and not known what to say. A fiancé’s sister is a difficult character to know what to do with. She is a future sister-in-law and therefore a potential source of trouble. At the same time she is the representative, anyhow, for the time being, of the fiancé’s family. It is up to her to welcome friends and relations from the opposing camp.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“Oh, but surely,’ Henry said. ‘We’ve got a lot of things to arrange, and it doesn’t do any good to worry about money, you know, and we’ve got heaps for the time being.’ Pamela didn’t say anything. Perhaps she was regretting the two hundred pounds she had given to ‘that woman.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“He had been dramatic when, as a very small child on his first visit to London, he and mother had lost sight of each other for a few moments in Harrod’s Stores. Henry had rushed screaming up to the nearest saleswoman and told her that his mother had been kidnapped.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“And I had read the beginnings of most of Dickens’s novels; when the characters had grown up I had lost interest in them.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“I sat down beside one of the bookcases. I was worrying again about improving my mind; but where to start? Motley’s Dutch Republic, Tudor Cornwall, The History of Greece? It would take ages to read any of them and even then my knowledge would be specialised. I didn’t want to be a specialist, I wanted to know everything.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“Mind you,’ Henry said, ‘I’m not fussy. I don’t really notice where I live, as long as I’ve got a bed, you know.’ I said that was lucky, and Henry said, yes it was, and that he was quite happy having his dinner off the floor. It made an unconvincing picture of home life, but he had probably never actually done it and I reflected on his charming inconsistency. He didn’t mind where he lived; but he must live at Trelynt.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“I hoped that when he did meet him Gerald really would find that Henry was charming or, at any rate, interesting. Of course, Henry was a human being and human beings were always interesting. People were quite different. They overcrowded the buses and they created queues.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“I wondered what Gerald’s mother was like; but I couldn’t agree with him that a family and a settled background were invariably assets.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“Tonight, with seven people to be provided with tea, there was not much choice. It was this scarcity of the most ordinary kind of equipment which had surprised me on first coming to live with Stephanie. I could understand that china got broken, and that silver was liable to get dents in it and become scratched; what I could not understand was the china not having been nice in the first place, and the silver not having been silver. I decided that these things were a mark of a superior mind.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry