All the titles may be found using the Project Gutenberg search engine. After downloading a specific file, the location and complete context of the quotations may be found by inserting a small part of the quotation into the 'Find' or 'Search' functions of the user's word processing program. The quotations are in two formats: 1. Small passages from the text. 2. An alphabetized list of one-liners. The editor may be contacted at <widger@cecomet.net> for comments, questions or suggested additions to these extracts. D.W. WIDGER'S QUOTATIONS of JOHN GALSWORTHY THE FORSYTE SAGA: VOLUME 1. THE MAN OF PROPERTY /gutenberg/etext01/mnprp10.txt PASSAGES FROM THE TEXT: The simple truth, which underlies the whole story, that where sex attraction is utterly and definitely lacking in one partner to a union, no amount of pity, or reason, or duty, or what not, can overcome a repulsion implicit in Nature. The tragedy of whose life is the very simple, uncontrollable tragedy of being unlovable, without quite a thick enough skin to be thoroughly unconscious of the fact. Not even Fleur loves Soames as he feels he ought to be loved. But in pitying Soames, readers incline, perhaps, to animus against Irene: After all, they think, he wasn't a bad fellow, it wasn't his fault; she ought to have forgiven him, and so on! "Let the dead Past bury its dead" would be a better saying if the Past ever died. The persistence of the Past is one of those tragi-comic blessings which each new age denies, coming cocksure on to the stage to mouth its claim to a perfect novelty. The figure of Irene, never, as the reader may possibly have observed, present, except through the senses of other characters, is a concretion of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive world. She turned back into the drawing-room; but in a minute came out, and stood as if listening. Then she came stealing up the stairs, with a kitten in her arms. He could see her face bent over the little beast, which was purring against her neck. Why couldn't she look at him like that? But though the impingement of Beauty and the claims of Freedom on a possessive world are the main prepossessions of the Forsyte Saga, it cannot be absolved from the charge of embalming the upper-middle class. When a Forsyte was engaged, married, or born, the Forsytes were present; when a Forsyte died--but no Forsyte had as yet died; they did not die; death being contrary to their principles, they took precautions against it, the instinctive precautions of highly vitalized persons who resent encroachments on their property. "It's my opinion," he said unexpectedly, "that it's just as well as it is."