The History of Mr. Polly

"He suffered rom indigestion now nearly every afternoon in his life, but as he lacked introspection e projected the associated discomfort upon the world. (...) It is a pity that some human being are not more transparent. I Mr. Polly, for example, had been transparent, or even passaby translucent, then perhaps he might have realized, from the Laocoon struggle he would have glimpsed, that indeed he was not so much a human being as a civil war."

(...)

"Fifteen years ago, and it might have seemed to you that the queer little flower of Mr. Polly's imagination might be altogether withered and dead, and with no living seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty"

(...)

"They were both tremendously earnest and reasonable in their manner. They wished every manner. They wished every one to regard them as responsible and intellctual men acting for the love of right and the enduring good of the world. They felt they must treat this business as a proound and publicly significant affair. They wanted to explain and orate and show the entire necessity of everything they had done. Mr. Polly was convinced he had never been so absolutely correct in all his lie as when he planted his foot in the sanitary dubstin, and Mr. Rusper considered his clutch at Mr. Polly's hair as the one faultess impulse in an otherwise undistinguishd career."

(...)

"This is a history, and not a glorification of Mr. polly, and I tell of things as they were with him. Apart from the disagreeable twinge arising from te thought of what might happen if he was found out, he had not the slightest remorse about that fire. (...) If our community was collectively anything more than a feeble idiot, it would burn most of London and Chicago, for example, and build sane and beautiful cities in the place of these pestilential heaps of rotten private property."

(...)

""One seems to start in life," he said, "expecting something. And it doesn't happen. And it doesn't matter. One starts with ideas that things are good and things are bad - and it hasn't much in relation to what is good and what is bad. I've always been the skeptaceous sort, and it's always seemed rot to me to pretend men know good from evil. It's just what I've never done. No Adam's apple stuck in my throat, Ma'am. I don't own to it." (...) "I've never really planned my life, or set out to live. I happened; things happened to me. It's so with every one." (...) 2It isn't what we try to get that we get, it isn't the good we think we do is good. What makes us happy isn't our trying, what amkes others happy isn't our trying."

H.G.Wells