Quotes from Monica Dickens

Nothing that ever happens in life can take away the fact that I am me. So I have to go on being me.

Riding is a complicated joy. You learn something each time. It is never quite the same, and you never know it all.

Writing is a cop-out. An excuse to live perpetually in fantasy land, where you can create, direct and watch the products of your own head. Very selfish.

Nursing is a kind of mania; a fever in the blood; an incurable disease which, once contracted, cannot be got out of the system. If it was not like that, there would be no hospital nurses, for compared dispassionately with other professions, the hours are long, the work hard, and the pay inadequate to the amount of concentrated energy required. A nurse, however, does not view her profession dispassionately. It is too much a part of her.

Nothing that ever happens in life can take away the fact that I am me. So I have to go on being me.

Writing is a cop-out. An excuse to live perpetually in fantasy land, where you can create, direct and watch the products of your own head. Very selfish.

But Mariana was wrong. You couldn't die. You had to go on. When you were born, you were given a trust of individuality that you were bound to preserve. It was precious. The things that happened in your life, however closely connected with other people, developed and strengthened that individuality. You became a person.

However, now she was a schoolgirl no longer. She had discovered how to manage her hair, had been to one or two parties and a night club, and laid on lipstick with the idea that each layer was a layer of sophistication.

When I can't ride anymore, I shall keep horses as long as I can hobble around with a bucket and a wheelbarrow. When I can't hobble, I shall roll my wheelchair out to the fence of the field where my horses graze and watch them. Whether by wheelbarrow or wheelchair, I will do likewise to keep alive-as long as I can do as best I can-my connection with horses.

The lovely effects of champagne were quite gone and only the nasty ones were left; the taste in the mouth, the splitting ache in the brow and the impotence of not being able to clarify one's thoughts.

Now that it was safe to drag their relationship out into the light and examine it mercilessly it was fantastic on what a thin basis they had proposed to build their life. Apart from physical attraction, there was nothing between them but fun and parties, and that was not entirely a taste in common. Life was like a jigsaw, but if you tried to fit the pieces together yourself, you generally got them wrong.

What else happened?' she asked, not because she was particularly interested, but because one must talk to one's mother when she came to visit one, however tired and dispirited one felt.

It was with a shock of pitying surprise that she realized, in later years, that the grown-ups had missed the paradise which the children found so easily.

A decision loses its charm unless you can act on it immediately.

Beyond the room, the night was lashing itself to an impotent fury of wind and rain. Mary thought how strange it was to think that only a few inches of wall separated the placid cosiness of the sitting-room from the howling, streaming darkness. Houses were very defiant things.

Christine had wanted to continue the conversation where she was, with the unappetising tray of dressings balanced on her hip. The most interesting things never cropped up when you were sitting comfortably in chairs. It was always in transient places like halls or staircases or bathroom doorways that the really important things started to be said and you had to discuss them then and there, because the mood was lost if you moved away to a more suitable place.

That often happens when you plan a story to tell someone, because while you are planning it you write all the dialogue yourself – theirs as well as yours – and then, of course, they don't know their part.

When people are drunk the first time you meet them, you are inclined to think of them as permanent dipsomaniacs

Mary could be as sullen or rebellious as anyone on occasion, but she never achieved the glorious abandon with which Angela simply went her own way, uncaring.

She did not get a medal - it was not fair. 'What a swizz,' she whispered bitterly to her mother as Cicely Barnard's name was called. 'She simply doesn't know enough to be bad.

People were kind and friendly and amusing, but they thought that companionship and conversation were synonymous, and some of them had voices that jarred in your head. There was a lot to be said for dogs. They understood without telling you so, and they were always pleasing to look at, awake or asleep, like Bingo. He slept now, with little whistling snores, in his basket at the side of the fire, his stubby legs and one whiskery eyebrow twitching to the fitful tempo of his dreams.

Life was like a jigsaw, but if you tried to fit the pieces together yourself, you generally got them wrong. Pierre had money; she needed money. Pierre was lovable and loved her; she would marry him. She had thought that was the pattern the pieces made. But it had been like trying to force two pieces together that didn't fit, and then, suddenly, the jigsaw had been done, in quite a different way, by other hands.

Doris was getting No. 4 ready for a new guest. The floor did not trouble her much, but she spent quite a long time on the taps and the veneered top of the dressing-table. Dusting and polishing she liked—things that showed—but those bits of fluff and dried mud at the bottom of the wardrobe she just pushed back into a corner. There was no means of getting them out, anyway, with that ridge at the front. Furniture was always made as inconvenient as possible. Doris was used to that.

fifty, ambitiously but unsuccessfully dressed in a black satin