Quotes from Sybille Bedford

In Europe, where human relations like clothes are supposed to last, one's got to be wearable. In France one has to be interesting, in Italy pleasant, in England one has to fit.

It would seem that in history it's never a tooth for a tooth, but a thousand, a hundred thousand for one.

To remain monolingual reduces the mind to the confines of a tramline.

What I learnt came to me . . . at second and at third hand, in chunks and puzzles, degrees and flashes.

A biographer is an artist under oath.

She was also incapacitated by much of daily life and had 'no aptitude whatsoever' for domesticity.

When one's young, everything is a rehearsal. To be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance.

Guillermo was lonely and serviceable and always rushed in to do the things one wanted in a way one did not want them done.

I have not the slightest desire to see the wonders of nature', said E. 'Of course not my dear. But what else can we do?

My interest in how people lived was nourished quite literally by the food I shared with them.

In Europe where human relations like clothes are supposed to last, one's got to be wearable. In France one has to be interesting, in Italy pleasant, in England one has to fit.

Dominion over his environment was supposed to be a hallmark of man. Now, that dominion is almost wholly vicarious, derived from the past ingenuity of others. In urban and industrial communities it is never direct, physical or spontaneous. Our implements are at twelve removes and we may all live to live inside so many Thermos flasks. It may be well to remember how to use a pair of sticks and a stone.

Hate is nothing, even in politics, hate is only temper and unhappiness; it's an accident. It is stupid and unkind to let it overtake one.

Im my native country I successfully avoided seeing the Grand Canyon; I avoided the Painted Desert, my nurse did not manage to drag me to Niagara. With all respect to Alexander von Humboldt, I will not get myself off this contraption to look at a tree however interesting.

Besides, far better always to fend alone than with an uncertain ally.

People are not the same—it is unnatural to pretend they are.

What was being put over (by Musso[lini] & Co.) was, she was never in doubt, based on trickery and false values, sanctified aggression, pandered to false pride; it made ignorant youth feel important, gave foolish people spurious hopes – it was dangerous stuff.

Mama, unforgivingness breeds war; exploited resentment, treasured grievances. If we don't learn to forget a wrong no sooner than it's done or said, if we don't all of us—privately and collectively—draw a line below the past every day of our lives, we're going to be sunk. We are sunk.

All food is the gift of the gods and has something of the miraculous, the egg no less than the truffle.

The future of human society. Had it made an irrevocably false start? The compass error that gets harder to correct with every mile you go?