Nancy Mitford Quotes
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Oh dear... it really is rather disillusioning. When one's friends marry for money they are wretched, when they marry for love it is worse. What is the proper thing to marry for, I should like to know?
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Irish gardens beat all for horror. With 19 gardeners, Lord Talbot of Malahide has produced an affair exactly like a suburban golf course.
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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.
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In France that is the one rule, never make trouble.
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Greece is not a country of happy mediums: everything there seems to be either wonderful or horrible.
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Twice in her life she had mistaken something else for it; it was like seeing somebody in the street who you think is a friend, you whistle and wave and run after him, and it is not only not the friend, but not even very like him. A few minutes later the real friend appears in view, and then you can't imagine how you ever mistook that other person for him. Linda was now looking upon the authentic face of love, and she knew it, but it frightened her. That it should come so casually, so much by a series of accidents, was frightening.
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Americans relate all effort, all work, and all of life itself to the dollar. Their talk is of nothing but dollars.
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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.
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Always remember, children, that marriage is a very intimate relationship. It's not just sitting and chatting to a person; there are other things, you know.
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Nothing about human beings ever had the power to move me as a child. Black Beauty now ... !
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It's a funny thing that people are always ready to admit it if they've no talent for drawing or music, whereas everyone imagines that they themselves are capable of true love, which is a talent like any other, only far more rare.
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Most people like reading about what they already know - there is even a public for yesterday's weather.
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Do you always laugh when you make love?' said Fabrice. I hadn't thought about it, but I suppose I do. I generally laugh when I'm happy and cry when I'm not. Do you find it odd?
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Children should be like waffles--you should be able to throw the first one away.
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Spring came late, but when it came it was hand-in-hand with summer, and almost at once everything was baking and warm, and in the villages the people danced every night on concrete dancing floors under the plane trees.
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oh how television diminishes everything.
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Nothing makes people crosser than being considered too old for love.
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Surely a King who loves pleasure is less dangerous than one who loves glory?
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To fall in love you have to be in the state of mind for it to take, like a disease.
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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.
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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.
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I do love translating; it is the pure pleasure of writing without the misery of inventing.
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Sisters are a shield against life's cruel adversity.
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Always be civil to the girls, you never know who they may marry.
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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.
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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.
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Paris in the early morning has a cheerful, bustling aspect, a promise of delicious things to come, a positive smell of coffee and croissants, quite peculiar to itself. The people welcome a new day as if they were certain of liking it, the shopkeepers pull up their blinds serene in the expectation of good trade, the workers go happily to their work, the people who have sat up all night in night-clubs go happily to their rest, the orchestra of motor-car horns, of clanking trams, of whistling policemen tunes up for the daily symphony, and everywhere is joy.
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always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair they loved or they loathed, they lived in a world of superlatives
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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.
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If one can't be happy, one must be amused.
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