Elizabeth Jane Howard Quotes
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I think best in a hot bath, with my head tilted back and my feet up high.
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This duel of consideration for one another that they had conducted for the last sixteen years involved shifting the truth about between them or withholding it altogether and was called good manners or affection, supposed to smooth the humdrum or prickly path of everyday married life. Its tyranny was apparent to neither.
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It's better to oversleep and miss the boat than get up early and sink.
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... the house seemed filled with dusty sunlight, which rose politely from wherever it had been resting on floors and windowsills, and then hung motionless and golden in the air until they moved to another room.
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A good mystery keeps you up on Saturday night. A bad mystery puts you to sleep on Sunday afternoon. Either way, you come out ahead.
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Alone, without the looking-glass of another person’s presence, the mirrors of the imagination sometimes effect cunning distortions.
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Her time with him had very quickly started to feel unreal so that she could hardly believe her own memory of it.
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Lady Margaret believed in the three D's: Discipline, Desire, and Determination. But as she listened dutifully to her new employer, hiding her yawns and trying to sit up extra straight in her chair, Charity Hill began thinking of all the lovely things that began with S, such as Sleeping Late, Sex, and Shopping.
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How the alternative reduces one's prospect and petrifies the imagination in a way that the possibility can never do. Possibilities, innumerable and tightly packed, could shower forth like mushroom spore between such alternatives as being here, or there; alive, or dead; and old, or young.
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The craze of genealogy is connected with the epidemic for divorce. If we can't figure out who our living relatives are, then maybe we'll have more luck with the dead ones.
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She laughed at bad jokes, stayed out too late, and overslept too often. Charity Hill loved holidays and she hated budgets and the alarm clock.
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Sir Humphrey's stories about Africa made Charity feel exactly like one of his stuffed trophy heads -- lifeless and glassy eyed. The only difference was that she usually ended up face-down, slumbering on the sofa, instead of hung up on the wall.
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Charity knew there was nothing more coarse and common than an afternoon in bed with a total stranger -- but the lad installing the telephone had a grin that made her heart turn flips.
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Laughter is just like champagne -- only without the headache afterwards.
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Dessert doesn't count if you're sharing someone else's.
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She looked as though everything that she didn't like had happened to her.
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Holidays were invented so single women could overeat without feeling guilty.
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Why do they call them daytime dramas, anyway? Shouldn't they be bedtime dramas? All anyone ever talks about is getting someone into bed! Plus if you're at home watching, you're probably watching in bed. And if you're like me, after an hour or two of watching all those sexy goings-on you forget the silly story entirely and fall asleep. Just like it's bedtime!
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It seemed awful that the only things she knew about him were those that made him miserable.
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Charity felt rather snoozy after the long sermon, and she was really very grateful when Reverend Meeps offered her a cup of tea. Church was not so bad when the minister remembered you were only human.
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The real point of watching television is to forget that you have a brain.
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Wandering down the street in an aimless sort of way, cold too, in a dress from last night that made young men stop and stare in the street, Charity Hill found herself hating the single life for the very first time.
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It's all right, darling. I can't stand people who are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at seven in the morning. Give me a girl who only gets going after ten!
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For a single girl in London, luck isn't always a glass slipper that fits. Sometimes luck is a splash of mud from a passing bus.