Quotes from Julian Fellowes

That is a good deal happier than a large proportion of my address book.

The past, as we have been told so many times, is a foreign country where things are done differently.

Aunque la mayoría de las personas son más desgraciadas cuando están enamoradas, no deja de ser el estado en el que más desea estar el ser humano

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

The servants really were worse than the rats

Ich kenne den hochmoralischen Ton nur zu gut, den die rotnasigen Alkoholiker unter den Journalisten so gern anschlagen, wenn sie sich über die Fehltritte der Großen auslassen.

All the world knows it is better to be gullible than suspicious.

There is a religion somewhere in the world that believes we all die twice; once in the normal way and the second time when the last person who really knew us dies, so one's living memory is gone from the earth.

How little Americans know when they disparage acquaintanceship in favour of real, true friendship. It is in acquaintanceship, bringing with it as it does delicious dinners, comfortable weekends, gossip shared in picturesque surroundings, but no real intimacy, no responsibility, that the greatest charm of social intercourse lies. I am an observer. It troubles me to be forced into the role of participant.

Not for the last time she was struck by the tyranny of the socially inept. Endless effort is harnessed to a sluggish and boring conversation simply to preserve these dullards from a sense of their inadequacy. The irony being that they are quite impervious to their own shortcomings.

But then, as she told herself, who would learn better than she that hindsight is a prism that alters everything?

She would certainly allow John to give himself the credit for turning her head and luring her into sin—all men like to feel they are leading the dance—but the truth was that if Susan had not made the decision to go astray, it would not be happening.

Nobody ever told you to expect any more than you were given. There are many men who would think it a fine thing to be a cleric living in a large rectory, without having to do a stroke of work from January to December.

They say one sign of growing old is that the past becomes more real than the present and already I can feel the fingers of those lost decades closing their grip round my imagination, making more recent memory seem somehow greyer and less bright.

moment that the parents of one's friends choose to die or go to

be honest, he sometimes felt a creeping impatience for his father to quit the scene, leaving John as his uncle's direct heir.

John thought himself irresponsible, but surely women were a safer addiction than gambling.

She spoke like a tsar issuing a ukase, and it was clear she would brook no further argument.

Lies are so complicated, she thought. And not for the first time.

Sometimes the weekend gets hijacked by work, but as my mother would say, this is the right problem.

There are some men who are frightened by strong women and some men who are nurtured by them and feel nervous, with weak clinging vines. And I am very much of the latter category.

I always like to arrive at the airport early to enjoy breakfast and lounge about so that when I get on the plane all my travel fever has disappeared.

My mother converted to Catholicism to marry my father.

I like to take a long time over breakfast, and I can't bear to talk. If a guest is a breakfast talker it's very important to invite another so they can talk to each other. Otherwise they spoil the newspaper reading and everything else.