Elizabeth Jane Howard Quotes
-
I think best in a hot bath, with my head tilted back and my feet up high.
-
I'm not lazy. I'm just really gifted, only instead of being good at music or math I'm good at sleeping late.
-
I'm not particularly keen on pity. Pity takes something away from grief. People think they're sharing it, but really they're just taking some. I prefer to keep my grief intact.
-
Laughter is just like champagne -- only without the headache afterwards.
-
She looked as though everything that she didn't like had happened to her.
-
Her time with him had very quickly started to feel unreal so that she could hardly believe her own memory of it.
-
Alone, without the looking-glass of another person’s presence, the mirrors of the imagination sometimes effect cunning distortions.
-
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.
-
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.
-
... 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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The real point of watching television is to forget that you have a brain.
-
Holidays were invented so single women could overeat without feeling guilty.
-
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.
-
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.
-
You can't run from feelings, Charity. You have to face them. Otherwise your future will look just like your past.
-
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.
-
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!
-
It's not a luxury if you can't do without it!
-
Men will consider deeply before they buy a tie or choose a meal; but when it comes to throwing aside their purpose in life, possibly life itself, they do not think at all. They consent to be marshalled, controlled, exposed to unimagined shock, mutilation and death, with barely a tremor, and their reasons for complying, if indeed they have any, would comparen most shamefully with their reasons for doing anything else.
-
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.
-
Dessert doesn't count if you're sharing someone else's.