Quotes from Dorothy Whipple

At some point in the family history, parents begin to look to children for explanation, instead of children to parents.

The days were lengthening. A wet primrose light lay over Wells Road. The lamps were like jewels, pale but piercingly bright. The air... fresh and mild.

To be asked by her to do something filled him with pleasurable strength, as if she called all his powers into play. He felt able to move heaven and earth, he said to himself. She was his enthusiasm.

No matter how you resent other people's company, when you have it, you can't concentrate so fiercely upon your misery as you would without it.

No such snake as family criticism had ever reared its head among the Lockwoods before.

Molly was bending over the table where her masterpiece, the white and silver cake, towered above her lesser achievements in the shape of patties, canapes, rolls, sandwiches, cakes and biscuits. A current of goodwill flowed from Molly through the food to the people who ate it and back again the same way. Her good cooking made the connection; she seemed to need no other.

She had a good memory, too good, perhaps, since it held her imprisoned in the past.

Doesn't it seem hard, Oliver, that as children, when we'll take any mould, we should be formed for the rest of our lives by small things that don't really matter in themselves at all? My grievance is that the Lockwoods were silly, selfish, snobbish, creatures with no single saving grace—except, perhaps, Clare—and yet I minded about them.

The young do not know what they do when they withdraw themselves from the old. Life, light and hope seemed to have gone with these three.

Children make parents as wretched as parents make children; but children do not really believe that. They can't understand how it is that those whom they take for tyrants can be hurt by the victims of the tyranny.