I’m working on compiling all of the quotes (“gobbits” :) that are used in the movie “The History Boys.” This is one of my favorite all-time movies, and I highly recommend it to anyone, especially if you’re a girl (um, eye candy) or have a fascination with history, literature, poetry (the good, 19th century kind), music, or other similar academic topics. If you love spending time in libraries, have a fascination with Europe, are trying to get into college, secretly like taking tests and just love the word “exam” for some reason, or speak French, I encourage you to see “The History Boys” ASAP.
That said, If you haven’t seen the movie you might want to stop reading this blog post. It contains no spoilers, but I think you’d do better to experience these quotes in their context of the movie rather than this drier list. I have tried to include quotes, poems, excerpts from any text, and titles of songs. They mostly go chronologically through the movie.
I’ll keep adding to this and if you have suggestions please let me know!
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“Wish Me Luck” (song) — Gracie Fields
“The happiest youth, viewing his progress through,
What perils past, what crosses to ensue,
Would shut the book, and sit him down and die.” – King Henry IV, Shakespeare
“All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use.” — A.E. Housman
“Loveliest of trees, the cherry now…” — A.E. Housman
“Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters;
Enough their simple loveliness for me.” – Keats
“L’achordioniste” (song) — Orig. Edith Piaf
“Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;
…
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word—the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.” — Philip Larkin, “MCMXIV”
“Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” (song) — Orig. Ella Fitzgerald
“Now Voyager” (movie, 1942)
“The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted,
Now, Voyager, sail thou forth to seek and find.” — Walt Whitman, “Untold Want,” from “Leaves of Grass”
“The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window.” — W. H. Auden
“Breaking bread with the dead” — W.H. Auden (Full quote: “Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.”)
“England, you have been here tooo long,
And the songs you sing are the songs you sung
On a braver day. Now they are wrong.” – Stevie Smith, “Voices Against England in the Night”
“Brief Encounter” (movie, 1946)
“All literature is consolation.” — This was said by Dakin in the film, but my research has shown that it may have originated or been inspired by Boethius.
“Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” — Shakespeare, Sonnet 73
“The tree of man was never quiet:
Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.” – A.E. Housman, “On Wenlock Edge the Wood’s In Trouble”
“They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined — just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around:
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.
Young Hodge the drummer never knew –
Fresh from his Wessex home –
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.
Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.” — Thomas Hardy, “Drummer Hodge”
“That there’s some corner of a foreign field …
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;” — Rupert Brooke, “The Soldier”
“When I’m Cleaning Windows” (song) — George Thornby
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein
“The world is everything that is the case” — Ludwig Wittgenstein
“The open road, the dusty highway … Travel, change, interest, excitement! Poop poop!” — The Toad, from “The Wind in the Willows,” by Kenneth Grahame
“Bye Bye Blackbird” (song) — Mort Dixon, 1926
“Tu comprendras ce tu pas donné.” — Rudge says this twice, and I still can’t find its original context. I’ll keep looking!
