The Little Stranger Quotes
"I remember its lovely ageing details: the worn red brick, the cockled window glass, the weathered sandstone edgings."
"I wanted to possess a piece of it—or rather, as if the admiration itself, which I suspected a more ordinary child would not have felt, entitled me to it."
"My parents, my uncles, my schoolmasters—all the various adults who interested themselves in my career."
"But the world seems to be run by scientists and generals, all playing with bombs like so many schoolboys."
"I’ve never thought of myself as a discontented man. I have been too busy for discontentment to have had a chance to set in."
"That’s why they’re called patients, surely..."
"One never quite likes to breach those professional distances, somehow."
"One could see so painfully, I thought, both the glorious thing it had recently been, and the ruin it was on the way to becoming."
"I said, ‘It’s more powerful than you’d think.’"
"‘This used to be a billiard room,’ Roderick said to me, seeing my face."
"I feel like I’m joining the Freemasons! I don’t have to swear an oath or anything?"
"I told you, didn’t I? You’re doing me the favour."
"‘Oh, I oughtn’t to complain. He’s had it tough, with this bloody heat wave: we’ve lost milk, we’ve lost grass, we’ve already had to start the herd off on next winter’s feed.'"
"‘But you liked the house, even then?’ ‘Enough to want to vandalize it.’"
"‘Hundreds is lovely. But it’s a sort of lovely monster! It needs to be fed all the time, with money and hard work.'"
"‘We used to throw two or three parties a year here, you know, in the old days,’ she said."
"You’re real ly too kind to us, Dr Faraday."
"The tongues of Kids shall be thy meate, Their Milke thy drinke; and thou shalt eate The Paste of Filberts for thy bread With Cream of Cowslips butterèd."
"That’s my mother’s idea of keeping a confidence, is it? Just what did she tell you? That she found me in a blue funk?"
"You mustn’t think I make a habit of this sort of thing. If anyone comes, I’ll lie, and say we were looking for a book or something."
"It's about the last thing they need at the moment. They've been good to you, remember? Remember how they called me in for you, that time you were poorly, in July?"
"You mean it? Well, since I’ve more or less become Rod’s doctor."
"You look like you need cheering up, and it's only some old brown sherry. I keep it on hand for pregnant women."
"I'm not watching. I'm looking out, at the High Street. I can see my car. I'm afraid she wants washing and polishing, rather badly."
"For God’s sake, why didn’t you come to me sooner!"
"You must give me another drink first. I can’t face it sober."
"I don't want to go to the bloody party in the first place."
"Keeping everyone waiting, chasing around the room like a twit."
"I can think of a young married woman, just pregnant, who came to see me with a summer cough."
"The thickening tumor, the spreading cancer, the clouding eye: they are part of a family doctor’s caseload."
"I don't want to mince words with you. I think your problem is a mental one."
"War-shock! That's more common than you would think, too."
"I had rather there were some physical problem here; it would be easier to treat."
"The first trace of bad weather and he's at home with his feet up."
"I wish I had gone shares in that garage. I'd be a happier man than I am now."
"I can sense it. I've a feeling for it now. I'm like a weather-vane, I start twitching when the wind's on the turn."
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! My God, it's cleverer than I thought!"
"It seemed impossible to me that the family could have gone through such an ordeal and not sent me word of it."
"I cursed myself for not having called her sooner."
"The fire had given them all ‘a little fright’: that was how she phrased it."
"Even a small fire can produce a great deal of smoke."
"The effects of smoke inhalation are often at their worst a day or two after the fire itself."
"I went to bed worried about the family, and passed another uneasy night on their behalf."
"I drove out to the house at the end of my round next morning."
"The room had been cleared of most of its furniture."
"The whole house might have been lost. It doesn’t bear thinking about!"
"Can’t people do hurtful things, sometimes, and not even know they’re doing them?"
"I should never have left your brother alone! I let him down. I’ve let you all down…"
"Can it be true that he hates us all so much? Is that why this has happened?"
"The strain? The house, the farm. The after-shock of his accident."
"We can’t care for him here. We simply haven’t the strength for it."
"I’m frightened, Dr Faraday. A nurse could only do so much."
"I think I can do no better than take him with me at once."
"I could almost wish the council wanted more of our land."
"It’s like some grisly sort of wound: one can’t help lifting up the bandage."
"The days are still so short. I hate them, don’t you?"
"But pride doesn’t make for happiness, does it?"
"Sometimes this house does seem changed to me, you know."
"It’s just, sometimes, I can’t help thinking about Roddie."
"Poor Roddie, though. I understand better now why the business so consumed him."
"The fact that I had brought Caroline there, with no thought for how the thing would look, seemed suddenly incredible."
"You mustn’t trouble. So foolish of me, after so much time."
"But the fact is, she had done nothing to deserve it. It was all filthy-minded Seeley’s fault."
"I felt I was being made an ass of, and it seemed to me that to strike him would only serve to give him the satisfaction that I was, at root, what he supposed me to be—a sort of rustic booby."
"It was a long time since I had kissed a woman; years, in fact, since I had held a woman in my arms with anything other than a rather perfunctory passion."
"But then she moved, or took a breath; her breast lifted into my hand and I became aware, not of the stiffly tailored cup of the brassière, but of the warm, full flesh inside it."
"She must have thought it funny, making a mark where we wouldn’t find it for months and months."
"This house is playing parlour games with us, I think. We shan’t pay it any mind if it starts up again."
"But then, with a queer little dropping of her heart, she looked again at what had been written, and suddenly understood her mother’s tears."
"This house breeds fancies; such silly thoughts. We’re too isolated out here."
"My husband always used to say that this Hall was the loneliest house in Warwickshire."
"I felt so guilty, with the war on, hanging on to all this."
"Things have changed—gone wrong—so badly, so quickly. There has to be something."
"Sometimes it seems clear. Other times, it’s just—too much. It’s all too much."
"We were different, a year ago. Things have clearly become too difficult for her."
"I didn’t suppose there was any trace of her left, you see."
"She couldn’t have made those knocks! I felt them!"
"I think she's been trying to retreat to an era when her life was easier."
"She’s entitled to look at photographs, isn’t she? Can you blame her for wanting to think about the past, when her present is so joyless?"
"You don’t know. Last night it all made sense to me. Listen."
"Look what you’ve got! This house is falling down around your ears!"
"Everything seemed to fall into place. I thought about Roddie so much, I could almost feel him here."
"I convinced myself I could almost hear my mother!"
"This house is making us all crazy; but not in the way you think."
"Then at least we’ll know. That will be something, won’t it?"
"You’re fat as anything. They must be feeding you well, at least!"
"You bring out the goods when the goods are needed."
"A family man never makes a good family doctor; he has too many worries of his own."
"The idea of one’s deceased relations floating around in the ether is really too much to stomach."
"The house is still at last. Whatever it was that was here, it has taken everything it wanted."
"The verdict returned was ‘suicide whilst the balance of mind was disturbed’."
"The story appeared that week in all the Midland papers."
"Remembering the time when the park had been briefly barricaded."
"I had a duplicate cut from the key to the garden door, too."
"Not surprisingly, Mrs. Ayres’s suicide shocked and stunned the whole district."
"Many people asked where Roderick was and when he would be coming home."
"I don’t think any of us could have predicted this."
"I said, ‘I don’t think any of us could have predicted this.’"
"I felt terribly uneasy at the thought of her there, alone in that house."
"The house, oddly enough, continued to feel strikingly calm."