The History of Mr. Polly

“Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.””

— H. G. Wells

“…growing a little tiresome on account of some mysterious internal discomfort that the local practitioner diagnosed as imagination””

— H. G. Wells

“Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asyluum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday! . . .””

— H. G. Wells

“I've never really planned my life or set out to live. I happened; things happened to me. It's so with everyone.””

— H. G. Wells

“For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash.””

— H. G. Wells

“But when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discovery. If the world does not please you, you can change it. Determine to alter it at any price, and you can change it altogether. You may change it to something sinister and angry, to something appalling, but it may be you will change it to something brighter, something more agreeable, and at the worst something much more interesting. There is only one sort of man who is absolutely to blame for his own misery, and that is the man who finds life dull and dreary. There are no circumstances in the world that determined action cannot alter, unless perhaps they are the walls of a prison cell, and even those will dissolve and change, I am told, into the infirmary compartment at any rate, for the man who can fast with resolution.””

— H. G. Wells

“Deep in the being of Mr. Polly, deep in that darkness, like a creature which has been beaten about the head and left for dead but still lives, crawled a persuasion that over and above the things that are jolly and "bits of all right," there was beauty, there was delight; that somewhere - magically inaccessible perhaps, but still somewhere - were pure and easy and joyous states of body and mind.””

— H. G. Wells

“There is only one sort of man who is absolutely to blame for his own misery, and that is the man who finds life dull and dreary.””

— H. G. Wells

“There are no circumstances in the world that determined action cannot alter, unless, perhaps, they are the walls of a prison cell, and even those will dissolve and change, I am told, into the infirmary compartment, at any rate, for the man who can fast with resolution.””

— H. G. Wells