If Winter Comes

“In this mere matter of conveyance a philosopher might trace back a singularly brutal and callous murder to the moulding into callous and brutal regard of other people's sufferings rendered into a perfectly gentle mind by the habit of daily travelling to business in London on the top of a motor omnibus.””

— A. S. M. Hutchinson

“It never occurred to her that any of these people had homes and it never occurred to her that the whole of the lower classes lived without any margin at all beyond keeping their homes together, or that if they stopped working they lost their homes, or that they looked forward to nothing beyond their working years because there was nothing beyond their working years for them to look forward to.””

— A. S. M. Hutchinson

“And a very good thing (he used to say), an excellent thing, the very best of practices, is to write a little every day. Just a little scrap, but cultivate the habit of doing it every day. I don't mean what is called keeping a diary, you know. Don't write what you do. There's no benefit in that. We do things for all kinds of reasons and it's the reasons, not the things, that matter. Let your little daily scrap be something you've thought. What you've done belongs partly to some one else; often you're made to do it. But what you think is you yourself: you write it down and there it is, a tiny little bit of you that you can look at and say, 'Well, really!' You see, a little bit like that, written every day, is a mirror in which you can see your real self and correct your real self. A looking-glass shows you your face is dirty or your hair rumpled, and you go and polish up. But it's ever so much more important to have a mirror that shows you how your real self, your mind, your spirit, is looking. Just see if you can't do it. A little scrap. It's very steadying; very steadying....””

— A. S. M. Hutchinson

“The first book he had ever bought "specially"”

— A. S. M. Hutchinson

“In a way he could not quite describe (he was a bad talker, framing his ideas with difficulty) he was attached to his books, not only for what was in them, but as entities. He had written once in a manuscript book in which he sometimes wrote things, "I like the feel of them and I know the feel of them in the same way as one likes and knows the feel of a friend's hand. And I can look at them and read them without opening them in the same way as, without his speaking, one looks at and can enjoy the face of a friend. I feel towards them when I look at them in the shelves,”

— A. S. M. Hutchinson

“Above all, he loathed and detested the vision which the word "den" always conjured up to him. This was a vision of the door of a typical den being opened by a wife, and of the wife saying in a mincing voice, "This is George in his den," and of boarding-house females peering over the wife's shoulder and smiling fatuously at the denizen who, in an old shooting jacket and slippers, grinned vacuously back at them. To Mark this was a horrible and unspeakable vision.””

— A. S. M. Hutchinson

“Mysterious journey! Uncharted, unknown and finally”

— A. S. M. Hutchinson

“they're indomitably blind and deaf to the hideous cruelties in their application. They mean well. They cause the most frightful suffering, the most frightful tragedies, but they won't look at them, they won't think of them, they won't speak of them: they mean well....””

— A. S. M. Hutchinson

“The conventions are all right, moral, sound, excellent, admirable, but to save their own face there's a blind side to them, a shut-eye side. Keep that side of them and you're all right. They'll let you alone. They'll pretend they don't see you. But come out and stand in front of them and they'll devour you. They'll smash and grind and devour you, Hapgood. They're devouring me.””

— A. S. M. Hutchinson