Nancy Mitford Quotes
-
What is so nice & so unexpected about life is the way it improves as it goes along. I think you should impress this fact on your children because I think young people have an awful feeling that life is slipping past them & they must do something - catch something - they don't quite know what, whereas they've only got to wait & it all comes.
-
To fall in love you have to be in the state of mind for it to take, like a disease.
-
Oh how television diminishes everything.
-
Surely a King who loves pleasure is less dangerous than one who loves glory?
-
When the loo paper gets thicker and the writing paper thinner, it's always a bad sign, at home.
-
I Love children, especially when they cry for then someone takes them away.
-
I have only ever read one book in my life, and that is White Fang. It's so frightfully good I've never bothered to read another.
-
An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off; it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.
-
Life itself, she thought, as she went upstairs to dress for dinner, was stranger than dreams and far, far more disordered.
-
If one can't be happy, one must be amused.
-
You've no idea how long life goes on and how many, many changes it brings. Young people seem to imagine that it's over in a flash, that they do this thing, or that thing, and then die, but I can assure you they are quite wrong.
-
People in towns are always preoccupied. 'Have I missed the bus? Have I forgotten the potatoes? Can I get across the road?
-
Chickens are cheerless birds, I advise you to keep geese which can be taught to follow like dogs, one needs all the companionship one can get in these days.
-
The English lord marries for love, and is rather inclined to love where money is; he rarely marries in order to improve his coat of arms.
-
I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened.
-
One thing about tourists is that it is very easy to get away from them. Like ants they follow a trail and a few yards each side of that trail there are none.
-
Greece is not a country of happy mediums: everything there seems to be either wonderful or horrible.
-
Always be civil to the girls, you never know who they may marry' is a aphorism which has saved many an English spinster from being treated like an Indian widow.
-
English doctors have killed 3/4 of my friends & the joke is the remaining 1/4 go on recommending them, so odd is human nature.
-
Children should be like waffles--you should be able to throw the first one away.
-
A typical Irish dinner would be: cream flavored with lobster, cream with bits of veal in it, green peas and cream, cream cheese, cream flavored with strawberries.
-
The test of a cook is how she boils an egg. My boiled eggs are fantastic, fabulous. Sometimes as hard as a 100 carat diamond, or again soft as a feather bed, or running like a cooling stream, they can also burst like fireworks from their shells and take on the look and rubbery texture of a baby octopus. Never a dull egg, with me.
-
The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life's essential unfairness.
-
Irish gardens beat all for horror. With 19 gardeners, Lord Talbot of Malahide has produced an affair exactly like a suburban golf course.