Quotes from Beverley Nichols

Marriage is a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.

Every moment of this strange and lovely life from dawn to dusk, is a miracle. Somewhere, always a rose is opening its petals to the dawn. Somewhere, always, a flower is fading in the dusk.

To dig one's own spade into one's own earth! Has life anything better to offer than this?

It is only to the gardener that time is a friend, giving each year more than he steals.

Marriage is a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.

Into the room, with great dignity, stalked One and Four. They had mud on their paws, and they naturally decided to sit on my lap. They smelt of moss and loam, and they both set up a slow, tranquil purr. Cats, I thought, are the best.

If these are the achievements of man, give me the achievements of geraniums.

By the way, the best place to find names for fictional characters, if you are ever foolish enough to write a novel, is in a Bradshaw or an ABC. All the nicest people always sound like railway stations.

The Oldfields of the future are beyond hearing; they are shut up in the factories and the workshops, leading a rackety and mechanical existence, to the damage of their bodies and the peril of their souls, for the sake of an extra pound or so a week, which they promptly spend on mental or physical narcotics.

It was not till I experimented with seeds plucked straight from a growing plant that I had my first success...the first thrill of creation...the first taste of blood. This, surely, must be akin to the pride of paternity...indeed, many soured bachelors would wager that it must be almost as wonderful to see the first tiny crinkled leaves of one's first plant as to see the tiny crinkled face of one's first child.

The one thing with which you must not adorn [syllabub] is a bottled cherry. Bottled cherries are the quintessence of nastiness in whatever form they are served, tasting of mouth-wash and recalling the lipsticks of undesirable barmaids.

Every leaf that taps against the attic window, every thorn that nestles against the bricks, is part of a barrier that keeps the twentieth century at bay. I have always taken a dim view of the twentieth century, so that I consider this to be a laudable amibition.

He was succeeded by a gentleman who gazed at the Brussels sprouts and asked if the funny little knobs on the stalks were a form of disease. I told him yes. Eczema.

A thing that is worth doing at all is worth doing badly... le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.

There are all sorts of people who will tell you that worms do not mind being cut in half at all because both halves go on living - that the worms laugh it off with an airy shrug of the shoulders, exclaiming 'Oh look! This funny man has cut me in half! How amusing! Now I can go away for a weekend with myself!

It is rather his mind has so wide a range, and so rich a retention, that he simply cannot understand that ordinary folk do not always follow him. 'I little imagined,' he said, 'that I should find you in the posture of Sir Isaac Newton.' Oh dear, I thought, here it comes again. What on earth was the meaning of *that*? So I just said No... and went fiddling with the oil-squirter, trying to remember things about Newton.

We have already noticed two of Our Rose's most irritating affectations - her trick of calling inanimate objects 'he' or 'she,' and the way in which she says 'we' when she means 'you.' To these must now be added a third - her habit of looking rapturously into space and saying 'I see' this or that when, in fact, there is nothing there for her to see at all.

Well, I love geraniums, and anybody who does not love geraniums must obviously be a depraved and loathsome person.

Let us be honest: most of us rather like our cats to have a streak of wickedness. I should not feel quite easy in the company of any cat that walked around the house with a saintly expression.

Long experience has taught me that people who do not like geraniums have something morally unsound about them. Sooner or later you will find them out; you will discover that they drink, or steal books, or speak sharply to cats. Never trust a man or a woman who is not passionately devoted to geraniums.

A garden without cats, it will be generally agreed, can scarcely deserve to be called a garden at all...much of the magic of the heather beds would vanish if, as we bent over them, there was no chance that we might hear a faint rustle among the blossoms, and find ourselves staring into a pair of sleepy green eyes.

Do you ever find yourself bursting into a sort of lunatic laughter at the sheer prettiness of things?

We both know, you and I, that if all men were gardeners, the world at last would be at peace.

Marriage is a book in which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.