Quotes from Jane Gardam

I just knew I would be a writer. It just seemed the only sensible thing to do.

I longed from a tiny child to get away on my own. When I was five, I walked out along the sands from Redcar, nearly all the way to Hartlepool.

Jane Austen we know never let two men converse alone in any novel because what they said would be unknown to her.

Laywers, I suppose, were children once.

If you've not been loved as a child, you don't know how to love a child.

What I don't want is to be called an octogenarian. I saw 'Octogenarian Jane Gardam' and I thought 'Blow me!' I mean, I am, but that's not the point." (Inteview, The Guardian, 8 January 2011)

The astounding thing about Paula is that she looks like Tess of the D´Urbervilles, and she sounds like Tess of the D´Urbervilles, and she thinks like Tess of the D´Urbervilles and yet she is so different from Tess of the D´Urbervilles. I expect she comes from a different part of Dorset.

But there's time yet. The old women of the tribe have almost always been the wiser. If they keep their marbles long enough. Old men forget--or tend to reminisce, and reminisce falsely and sententiously as a rule. We are often very silly in our middle years but we tend to improve

Present us with a silver cup for something when you're a filthy rich lawyer, I dare say? Yes. You'll be a lawyer. Magnificent memory. Sense of logic, no imagination and no brains.

Laywers, I suppose, were children once.

For years of our lives the days pass waywardly, featureless, without meaning, without particular happiness or unhappiness. Then, like turning over a tapestry when you have only known the back of it, there is spread the pattern.

She wanted to take his hand. Her hardest task now as she grew older in the Ministry was to deal with her longing to be touched - hugged, stroked by anyone, any human being - a friend, a lover, a child or even (and here she scented danger) a servant. Of either sex. She prayed about it, asking that God's encircling arms would bring comfort. They did not

All my life I have felt events to be the result of my own sins.

He has not the faintest idea that I am ugly and we are very happy together.

Judges live with shadows behind them.

I was quite enchanted with myself. I had always thought I had very strong views on sexual morality. I found I had nothing of the kind.

On the whole I think poems don't crawl out of dreams. They are knocked out of rocks.

Ar vertÄ—jo mus sukurti, jie mes tokie prakeikti kvailiai?

Oh.' 'Veneering. The retired judge. Friend, no

Jei vaikyst?je tav?s nemyl?jo, tu nemok?si myl?ti vaiko. Meil? reikia patirti anks?iau. Gali ?skaudinti iš nežinojimo.

So the years passed and everyone grew old and Nell's husband died and Hilda grew to be a large, angry sort of woman very high up in local government. When Nell was eighty-four Hilda retired and they went to live at a sea-side place where Hilda had had meaningful holidays during the menopause with a woman called Audrey, now dead.

Memory changed for both Edward and Elisabeth. There were fewer people now to keep it alive.

The Titans were gone. They had clashed their last.

Amy planted a glass of brandy beside the bride's cornflakes.