Hangover Square Quotes

“She was decidedly attractive, he saw, but in an ill-natured, ungracious way. Because of his connection with Fitzgerald, Carstairs & Scott, Johnnie had an extensive knowledge of the external appearance and different modes of behavior of a great variety of attractive women: they came up to the office in shoals, with their nails dipped in blood and their faces covered with pale cocoa. And some were charming and simple beneath their masks, and some were complex and arrogant. This girl belonged to the latter type, the type which would ignore or stare surlily at him if he spoke to them, until they learned that the actual money came through him, when their manner sweetened wonderfully. This girl wore her attractiveness not as a girl should, simply, consciously, as a happy crown of pleasure, but rather as a murderous utensil with which she might wound indiscriminately right and left, and which she would only employ to please when it suited her purpose. They were like bad-tempered street-walkers, without walking the street.”
― Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square

“Those were the days when the three of them were smoking their first pipes, growing their first moustaches, having their first drunks and going with their first women, glorying in their release from meaningless discipline, in the prospect of earthly pleasures and an independent existence.”
― Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square

“Surely she had asked for it by being in that taxi with him.”
― patrick hamilton, Hangover Square

“He scanned the headlines gloomily, ‘TRAINS CRASH IN SNOWSTORM: 85 DEAD, 300 INJURED.’ He experienced a momentary feeling that he was about to be shocked, and then saw that the news came from Budapest, which meant that he did not have to be shocked. Train disasters, like Netta, had their own tragic haloes which grew faint and dissipated at a great enough distance.”
― Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square

“more human, more bestial, less agonizingly inaccessible. Inaccessible to him, of course, but not inaccessible. Instead of being jealous of Peter, he was in a manner grateful to him: he had brought her down to the sordid level of Peter – and on that level she did not hurt so much. She wasn’t violets and primroses in an April rain any more: she was a woman in bed with a nasty man in Earl’s Court. Good for Peter. Could this mood hold? Was he what they called ‘disgusted’, and had he a chance of getting out of love with her now? To his surprise it had seemed for a little that there was a possibility of this. He went round and met them that morning, went and had drinks at the ‘Black Hart’, and amazed himself by his coolness. He looked at them both as he talked to them; he thought of what he now knew about them; and all he was aware of was the change in the quality of his feelings towards Netta. She was still lovely; he still wanted her: but now he didn’t want her in the same mad, adoring way. He wanted her only in the way that Peter (and the other men on whom she had no doubt bestowed her favours) wanted her. She was something to be had by men, and as such he could do without her. Or so he believed. Indeed, after a few drinks that morning, his soul began to smile to itself. It smiled both at this change in his feelings”
― Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square

“It might be said that this feeling for violence and brutality, for the pageant and panorama of fascism on the Continent, formed her principal disinterested aesthetic pleasure. She had few others. She read practically nothing: she did not respond to music or pictures: she never went to the theatre and very seldom to the movies: and although she had an instinctive ability to dress well and effectively when she desired, she did not even like pretty things. She only liked what affected her personally and physically and immediately – sleep, warmth, a certain amount of company and talk, drinks, getting drunk, good food, taxis, ease. She was not even responsive to adulation, save when, coming from a man, it promised to further these necessities. She was atrophied. She looked like a Byron beauty, but she was a fish.”
― Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square

“Wanting no other man save the one she could not get, any other man, the nearest at hand, served her purpose.”
― Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square

“Her thoughts, however, resembled those of a fish – something seen floating in a tank, brooding, self-absorbed, frigid, moving solemnly forward to its object or veering slowly sideways without fully conscious motivation. She had been born, apparently, without any natural predilection towards thought or action, and the circumstances of her early life had seemed to render both unnecessary....

When Netta awoke this morning she was aware that she was feeling decidedly sick and giddy, that she had a ‘head’: but she did not relate her ‘head’ to the night before – to the fact that she had got drunk. Nor was she capable of connecting her present feeling of illness with the future: she had no idea of preventing a recurrence of such a feeling by making an attempt not to get so drunk again. She simply suffered it in a vacuum – as a habitual crook, who spends his entire life in and out of jail, suffers prison bars....

The same dull, fish-like style of thought which she brought to bear on the local exigencies of-life characterized her attitude to her existence generally. She was not without ambitions; she was steering a course of a sort; but dimly, without any fervour or coherence. She had at one time hoped to make good at films: she still vaguely hoped to do so: but she was unable to relate this ambition with the labour requisite for its maturing. She expected it to come to her as all things had come to her hitherto, by virtue of the stationary magnetism of her physical beauty. That was how she had got whatever jobs she had in the past, and that was how her frigid, inelastic mind conceived of getting them in the future.”
― Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square

“Her thoughts, however, resembled those of a fish – something seen floating in a tank, brooding, self-absorbed, frigid, moving solemnly forward to its object or veering slowly sideways without fully conscious motivation. She had been born, apparently, without any natural predilection towards thought or action, and the circumstances of her early life had seemed to render both unnecessary.”
― Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square

“There’s only one thing that’s any good with a certain type of woman, you know,’ went on Eddie. ‘Ask her for what you want, ask her whether she means to give it to you, and if she doesn’t, throw her out of the window.”
― Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square