Quotes from Julian Fellowes

How many of us, having cried bitter, rancid tears over a failed love, are actually disappointed when we discover, seeing the adored one again, that all trace of their power over us is gone? How often one has resisted the freedom-giving knowledge that they have actually begun to irritate us as that seems like the worst kind of disloyalty to our own dreams. No, while most people have been at their unhappiest when in love, it is nevertheless the state the human being yearns for above all.

The couple that never talk to each other never discover how little they have in common.

Oliver did not seem to understand that the only real fulfilment on this earth was to be gained through hard work. Life as a series of momentary pleasures satisfied no one. He needed to make an investment in it, an investment of himself.

Things were just as they had been a moment before, and yet somehow the tone and substance had changed.

This phenomenon, where the losers of a revolution try to demonstrate their support for, and approval of, the changes that have destroyed them, always fascinates me.

Nor should they be, but everyone needs to feel they're part of something worthwhile. That, in the last analysis, their life has some meaning in a larger context. The questions is what am I part of? What have I done?

Great grief can be worn charmingly by a beauty and I have seen a lot of gracious dignity at funerals in my time but it is my experience that when grief is becoming it is also suspect. Real unhappiness is ugly and wounding and scarring to the soul. I blush to recall that I was surprised that Charles – nice, bluff Charles with his shooting and his hedgerows and his dogs – had a heart that could be broken. But he had and I was there to witness its breaking.

Very few Englishmen ever ask a woman anything about themselves. They choose instead to lecture their dinner neighbors on a new and better route to the M5, or to praise their own professional achievements. So is a man does express any curiosity about a woman sitting next to him, about her feelings, about the life she is leading, she will generally tell him anything he cares to know.

She wasn't sure if they meant to be hurtful or if they were just profoundly tactless.

Mr Pope, there is no "Lady Maria and I". It is an absurd concept. You must understand just this: my daughter is a jewel as far above you as the stars.

You must decide whether you wish to get on with your children or live at war with them.

U]ns verband jene angenehme, anspruchslose Art von Freundschaft, die ausschließlich auf langer Dauer beruht. Wir hatten wenig gemeinsam, kannten aber sonst kaum jemanden, der sich an uns als Neunjährige beim Ponyreiten erinnerte; so hatten unsere gelegentlichen Begegnungen immer etwas Behagliches.

No, while most people have been at their unhappiest when in love, it is nevertheless the state the human being yearns for above all.

Physical beauty is a subject that many skirt around and almost everyone attempts to down-play thereby demonstrating some sound moral stance, but it remains one of the glories of human existence. Of course, there are many people who are attractive without being beautiful just as there are beauties who bore, and the danger of beauty in the very young is that it can make the business of life seem deceptively easy.

She was at that period of her life that almost everyone must pass through, when childhood is done with and a faux maturity, untrammeled by experience, gives one a sense that anything is possible until the arrival of real adulthood proves conclusively that it is not.

She had that uniquely English talent of demonstrating, through her scrupulously polite manner, just how awful she thought the company. She could leave a roomful crushed and rejected and yet congratulate herself on behaving perfectly. It is of course of all forms of rudeness the most offensive as it leaves no room for rebuttal.

But she did feel rather proud of him for once, which was a nice sensation.

In James's comparatively simple set of values, a little toadying seldom went amiss.

She had that absolute faith in the judgement of her own kind, seldom seen since 1914. No doubt it was common enough before then, which must have made Edwardian society such a philosophically relaxing place to be. If one were an aristocrat.

Sybil, vulgarity is no substitute for wit.

Dabei steckte mir nach meiner traurigen Jugend das altbekannte, für die späte Pubertät so typische Gefühlsgemisch aus Stolz und Verzweiflung noch tief in den Knochen, wenn man sich hochnäsig für etwas Besseres hält, aber gleichzeitig an sozialer Paranoia leidet.

she realized she felt happy, as if the sensation were so lost to her that it took a while for her to identify it.

Grace, as her mother had repeatedly told her, was very much second son material.

When I was young, men like my father would often come home and put on their smoking jacket over their perfectly ordinary trousers, as a way of relaxing in the evening.