Quotes from Rachel Ferguson

A woman at one of mother's parties once said to me, "Do you like reading?" which smote us all to silence, for how could one tell her that books are like having a bath or sleeping, or eating bread - absolute necessities which one never thinks of in terms of appreciation. And we all sat waiting for her to say that she had so little time for reading, before ruling her right out for ever and ever.

I often think that perhaps there is only a limited amount of memory going about the world, and that when it wants to live again, it steals its nest, like a cuckoo.

Running away from love is never any good at all, to our sort. It only deepens the feeling, and it's better to stay and wear it down.

A woman at one of mother's parties once said to me, "Do you like reading?" which smote us all to silence, for how could one tell her that books are like having a bath or sleeping, or eating bread - absolute necessities which one never things of in terms of appreciation. And we all sat waiting for her to say that she had so little time for reading, before ruling her right out for ever and ever.

Father's death left us very badly off, a fact mother circled round with us for a considerable time – she had her own bearings to get.

if any point of herd-etiquette arose which found him unprepared, he had the sense to write home at once for hints (mother had not had brothers of her own for nothing) and that Lalage and I backed her up and could nearly always be counted on to be brusque and caustic and common sense with him.

not one parent in a hundred realizes the premature pangs endured by thirteen, fourteen and fifteen. It gets called Outgrowing Their Strength and anaemia and The Awkward Age, but is usually an actor or a schoolmistress, and the fact that these untested devotions are laughable and essentially insatiable doesn't detract from their pathos, or from the tolls they take.

when we complained of the pigeons' greed and of the fact that they scared away the thrushes and blackbirds she said that they were very like humans, that their interests were so few that crumbgrabbing was their substitute for shady company-promoting.

the Seagrave kids', who, in point of fact, were, at the time of our move, four endlessly lanky young women of up to nineteen years old, with the face that goes with brogue shoes and tweed hats, and about as much bosom as imported rabbits.

I had gone for the letters at once. The post always intoxicates me; everythin it throws on to the mat is a magic square or oblong which may alter your life.

To her, I knew, I had already taken on the quality of a dream. I was merging into the saga, and she, fascinated, bewildered, was watching me fade...

a brew of tea or cocoa followed, with toddlings to the cupboard and a setting out of a bright canister. Any fool can offer you champagne. But if you can win a lonely, diffident old woman, living in her memories, to give you of her tea, then and not till then have you triumphed.

So many of the best things in life ultimately come to one through preliminaries utterly insignificant. The rule of the game seems to be that you must be unaware. If you enter it in a state of expectancy, with hope or dream or plan, it will not come to pass.

at a pinch even the best of men when in love scrap as a matter of course that code of honour which they observe in business office or at the card table and to each other, and about which they are so entertainingly strong and silent, but that where women are concerned they are capable of conduct, cowardices and dishonesties that would get them kicked out of any decent club or service.

I, too, have been bored to whimpering stage by others with reminiscent fish to fry, and oh! how they fry it! and with what exclamations and sizzling!

to a child, there is that fulfilment, that sense of endless interest, of 'something going on' and all-sufficing that I, for one, have lost for ever.

It is too late! oh, nothing is too late Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate. Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers When each had numbered more than fourscore years LONGFELLOW

The woman without a background has a thin time, at any age,

The relation in detail of one's dresses and dreams, together with plots of novels and plays one has read and seen should be made a penal offence, except perhaps to Mr. Henry James, to whom I would give the floor for a nightmare.

Mother was always the pleader for happiness.

Everyone has these rooms if they'd only realize it. And the most important thing is to find out what a room's trouble is. Usually, it is simply neglect, physical or social.

It was entirely characteristic of us to assume disaster and then mitigate it with consolations rather than to take happiness for granted and be appalled by hints that all was not well.

James and I chose Lalage to watch for Lady Vallant's arrival along the road, because Lalage is plucky and stolid and wouldn't muff things, and is, of course, the eldest, and poor Lalage turned crimson but trotted to her post all the same.

a gang of female hearties in khaki calling each other by surnames