Quotes from Angela Thirkell

It says there's no marriages in heaven, Mrs Powlett,' said Dorothy, giving a final polish to the pudding spoons with a piece of washleather. 'I'm ashamed of you, Dorothy,' said Mrs Powlett, 'speaking of the Bible as "it". And don't tell me it's in the Bible, Dorothy, for that is a book we were never meant to understand. Now come along and give me a hand and don't leave the shammy on the Vicar's chair.

Any relation of the Allington Dales?" said Lord Pomfret. "That old Miss Lily Dale was his great-aunt or something of the sort," said Admiral Palliser; but Lord Pomfret had never heard of her. "She was engaged to some man, then broke it off," said the Admiral, "and I gather she lived on the romance till she was well over eighty. A real Victorian heroine.

But miracles are not expected and mostly do not happen. Mr. Adams did not turn into a Belton, nor did his daughter. The aboriginal Hogglestock was deep in them; they conceived a slightly suspicious attitude to unknown people, ready to heave half-bricks; but they had also seen and admired another world, and could feel fairly at ease in it when sure that its intentions were good.

One is a young untried creature and then one day looks back and sees that young creature very far behind one; so distant that one can barely believe that one has journeyed so far.

When we are young we all look through our elders, to see what lies beyond. And when we see what is there, we are the elders ourselves.

John made himself agreeable to any girls who looked deserted or shy, and occasionally came over to see his mother. When he went to claim Mary for their dance, he found her looking happy and excited. 'I'm

Her husband avoided her activities as much as possible, and was very fond of her, having that affectionate reverence for his wife which is one of the advantages, from the female point of view, of the childless marriage.

This beer is the best I have ever tasted. Where do we get it? I must have a cask to hold my high revels." "It's not in casks, sir, it's bottled, from the Fleece down in the village. Light Lager." "We must always have this beer. I know beer. Few men know it as I do and this is BEER." "It's what we always have, sir." "It may be, it may be," said Mr Middleton rather crossly. "No thanks, no more. It is not so good now as it was before.

The Knox family were all there, as neither George's Catholicism nor his Presbyterianism prevented him from supporting the vicar, who was a great friend.

Hullo, Rose,' said Delia Brandon, 'you do look gorgeous. I wish I could have a wedding dress like that.' Rose said she thought white satin was a bit dispiriting, but Mummy would have it. 'And anyway,' she said with great simplicity, 'if there was a war or anything and John got killed or something, I could have it dyed black.

Captain Hornby thought this a very sensible idea. He knew, and Elsa knew, that the unspoken thought underlying her suggestion was, "If you are killed your lawyers will know what is here"; a thought which, spoken and unspoken, must underlie most people's arrangements now.

Mr. Cross, who was digging up dandelions on the lawn with a spud, came up to the car and courteously helped them out, which really makes the getting out more difficult, for there are only two ways of getting out of an ordinary small car: the one, to slide your legs out first and somehow get your skirt and the rest of you to follow rather like coming down a fire escape, the other to get out with your back to the audience and not care what it looks like.

I never did take sugar in my tea, or in coffee,' said the Vicar. 'I have always disliked it. But I understood that by taking saccharine, we were somehow assisting the war effort.

In that flash of ecstasy she suddenly knew what all poetry, all music, all sculpture, except things like winged Assyrian Bulls, or the very broken pieces in the British museum, meant.

What does Mrs Preston want to go abroad for?' asked Mr Leslie. 'I think her doctor wanted her to, Father,' said Agnes. 'Doctors!' said Mr Leslie, wiping the whole of the Royal College of Physicians off the face of the world with this withering remark.

That admirable woman thought so humbly of her own potboiling that to hear it stigmatised by a critic of Stoker's mental powers as rubbishy stuff didn't depress her in the least. If she could have made it more rubbishy, and so sold more thousands of copies than she did, she would willingly have done so, but the artist in her, on whose existence George Knox and Adrian always insisted, kept her standard up, firmly if spasmodically.

I am what is known as an omnivorous reader and it all goes right through me and out of my mouth.

What Everard and Philip felt about the hard luck, to give it no harder name, that might tear all their ex-pupils (for they could not help looking at the situation from their own schoolmastering point of view and especially from the point of view of their own school) from their various avocations and pitchfork them into the paths of glory which may lead but to the grave, was so mixed that neither of them could quite have put it into words.

This led her to a consideration of how very difficult it must be for people to write novels, because all the young heroines were in the Forces or civilian jobs, and all the young heroes the same, so that there was very little time for novelists to make them fall in love with each other, unless they made the hero be a flying officer and the heroine a Waaf, and then one would have to know all the details of the R.A.F or one would make the most dreadful howlers.

If only life were one long crisis, everyone would be perfect.

The great thing in life is not to be able to do things, because then they are always done for you.

But human nature cannot be content on a diet of honey and if there is nothing in one's life that requires pity, one must invent it; for to go through life unpitied would be an unthinkable loss.

First love is an astounding experience and if the object happens to be totally unworthy and love not really love at all, it makes little difference to the intensity of the pain.

If one cannot invent a really convincing lie, it is often better to stick to the truth.