The Good Soldier Quotes
"This is the saddest story I have ever heard."
"We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy."
"My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs. Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them."
"You will gather from this statement that one of us had, as the saying is, a 'heart'."
"I don’t mean to say that we were not acquainted with many English people. Living, as we perforce lived, in Europe, and being, as we perforce were, leisured Americans."
"Someone has said that the death of a mouse from cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the Goths, and I swear to you that the breaking up of our little foursquare coterie was such another unthinkable event."
"Isn’t there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves?"
"I know nothing—nothing in the world—of the hearts of men."
"I only know that I am alone—horribly alone."
"You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many."
"Permanence? Stability? I can’t believe it’s gone."
"For I swear to you that they were the model couple."
"I don’t know; I don’t know; was that last remark of hers the remark of a harlot, or is it what every decent woman, county family or not county family, thinks at the bottom of her heart?"
"But how can she have known what she knew? How could she have got to know it?"
"I don’t know. And there is nothing to guide us."
"I think an anecdote is about the best way to give you an idea of what the old gentleman was like."
"And the joke of the matter was that, when, at the age of eighty-four, just five days before poor Florence, he died of bronchitis there was found to be absolutely nothing the matter with that organ."
"I don’t in the least mean to say that this is not the most desirable type of life in the world; that it is not an almost unreasonably high standard."
"And then suddenly, as if by a flash of inspiration, I know."
"Why, even I, at this distance of time am aware that I am a little in love with her memory."
"But still, I do not know. Perhaps the poor young thing would have died—she was bound to die, anyhow, quite soon—but she would have died without having to soak her noonday pillow with tears."
"Leonora behaved better in a sense. She just boxed Mrs. Maidan’s ears."
"Leonora’s English Catholic conscience, her rigid principles, her coldness, even her very patience, were, I cannot help thinking, all wrong in this special case."
"For, along with his passions and his shame went the dread of scenes in public places, of outcry, of excited physical violence; of publicity, in short."
"I know that I am right in this. I know it because of the Kilsyte case."
"She was childless herself, and she considered herself to be to blame."
"She had come of a penniless branch of the Powys family, and they had forced upon her poor dear Edward without making the stipulation that the children should be brought up as Catholics."
"I think she would really have welcomed it if he could have come across the love of his life. It would have given her a rest."
"I fancy that, on the voyage from India, Leonora was as happy as ever she had been in her life."
"For, with the opening of that blackmailing letter from that injured brother officer, all the old terrors had redescended upon Leonora."
"He had done it once too often—and she was wrong for the first time, so that he acted a rather creditable part in the matter."
"As a matter of fact, Maisie’s being in Edward’s room had been the result, partly of poverty, partly of pride, partly of sheer innocence."
"At any rate the measure of my relief when Leonora said that she was an Irish Catholic gives you the measure of my affection for that couple."
"It was certainly an inopportune moment. For, with the opening of that blackmailing letter from that injured brother officer, all the old terrors had redescended upon Leonora."
"You come to me straight out of his bed to tell me that that is my proper place. I know it, thank you."
"I don’t care. If Florence has robbed a bank I am going to marry her and take her to Europe."
"I pray God to make me discharge mine as well. And, but for the poor girl, I daresay that I should never have seen it."
"She wanted, in one mood, to come rushing to me, to cast herself on her knees at my feet and to declaim a carefully arranged, frightfully emotional, outpouring as to her passion."
"It was the last straw. She ran upstairs, arranged herself decoratively upon her bed—she was a sweetly pretty woman with smooth pink and white cheeks, long hair, the eyelashes falling like a tiny curtain on her cheeks."
"She drank the little phial of prussic acid and there she lay—O, extremely charming and clear-cut—looking with a puzzled expression at the electric-light bulb that hung from the ceiling."
"I suppose that my inner soul—my dual personality—had realized long before that Florence was a personality of paper."
"I dare say she had that flask, apparently of nitrate of amyl, but actually of prussic acid, for many years and that she was determined to use it if ever I discovered the nature of her relationship with that fellow Jimmy."
"I guess it is vanity that makes most of us keep straight, if we do keep straight, in this world."
"Oh, well, the girls of the Holy Child have always been noted for their truthfulness. It’s a beastly bore, but I’ve got to do it."
"I dare say that the miserable nature of her childhood, coming before the mixture of saturnalia and discipline that was her convent life, added something to her queernesses."
"Her father was a violent madman of a fellow, a major of one of what I believe are called the Highland regiments."
"Mrs. Rufford was Leonora’s dearest friend and Leonora could be cutting enough at times."
"The Major would come in to lunch harassed and already spitting out oaths after an unsatisfactory morning’s drilling of his stubborn men beneath a hot sun."
"I fancy she was as nothing to Mrs. Rufford."
"Once, when she had been about twelve, Nancy had tried to intervene between the pair of them. Her father had struck her full upon the forehead a blow so terrible that she had lain unconscious for three days."
"Nevertheless, Nancy seemed to prefer her father to her mother. She remembered rough kindnesses from him."
"For Leonora was, in herself, relieved. She felt that she could trust Edward with the girl and she knew that Nancy could be absolutely trusted."
"Leonora had given up even showing the accounts of the Ashburnham estate to Edward."
"You must save Edward's life; you must save his life. All that he needs is a little period of satisfaction from you. Then he will tire of you as he has of the others. But you must save his life."
"I wish to God," she said, "that he was your husband, and not mine. We shall be ruined. We shall be ruined. Am I never to have a chance?"
"You see that it is your duty to belong to him. He must not be allowed to go on drinking."
"I knew you would come to that," she said, very slowly. "But we are not worth it—Edward and I."
"I should think myself defiled if Edward touched me now that he has touched you."
"You want to tell me that you are Edward’s mistress. You can be. I have no use for him."
"I don’t imagine that you did imagine it."
"You’ve done right, old girl. There’s nothing I like so much as to have a little to chuck away. And I can do it, thanks to you."
I am going to Glasgow to take my mother away from there. She added, "To the ends of the earth," for, if the last months had made her nature that of a woman, her phrases were still romantically those of a schoolgirl.