Quotes from Nancy Mitford

WHY SHOULD SHE want to be married?" "It's not as though she could be in love. She's forty.

It only shows, said Aunt Sadie, that nothing really matters the least bit, so why make these fearful efforts to keep alive? Oh, but it's the efforts that one enjoys so much, said Davey...

Oh darling, you know I don't know how to take things out of ovens, one's poor hands…. Besides, I do so hate getting up early.

I should like you to be on the verge of love but not yet quite in it. That's a very nice state of mind, while it lasts. -But of course, I had already dived over that verge and was swimming away in a blue sea of illusion towards, I supposed, the islands of the blest, but really towards domesticity, maternity and the usual lot of womankind.

Sonia's terribly fond of juggling with people's lives. I never shall forget when she made me go to her doctor...I can only say he very nearly killed me. It's not her fault if I'm here today. She's entirely unscrupulous. She gets a hold over people much too easily, with her charm and her prestige, and then forces her own values on them.

What did I tell you, Fanny, about air-raids not killing people. Here we are, right as rain. My bed simply went through the floor, Plon-plon and I went on it, most comfortable.

Houses are entirely different when you know them well, she thought, and on first acquaintance even more different from their real selves, more deceptive about their real character than human beings.

Time passed, and a morning came when Grace woke up at Yeotown feeling, if not quite happy, at least without a stifling blanket of unhappiness. This blanket had hitherto weighed upon her like something physical, so that there had been days when she had hardly been able to rise from under it and get out of bed.

The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life's essential unfairness.

Undeniable; Jennifer was one of those women whose meaning, if they have one, is only apparent to husband and children

No woman really minds hearing of the past affairs of her lover, it is the future alone that has the power to terrify

The really important thing, if a marriage is to go well, without much love, is very very great niceness— gentillesse —and very good manners.

Friendship is something to be built up carefully, by people with leisure, it is an art, nature does not enter into it.

Oh poor Octave, no luck at all, as usual, said Madame Rocher, he is still with his regiment, still only a captain. Of course, if it hadn't been for this wretched war, he would be at least a colonel by now.

These are the components of marriage, the wholemeal bread of life, rough, ordinary, but sustaining; Linda had been feeding upon honey-dew, and that is an incomparable diet

Oh what a pity it happens to be Davey's day for getting drunk. I long to tell him, he will be so much interested.

She had all the sentimentality of her generation, and this sentimentality, growing like a green moss over her spirit, helped to conceal its texture of stone, if not from others, at any rate from herself. She was convinced that she was a woman of profound sensibility.

Nonsense. And don't you go marrying just anybody, for love," she said. "Remember that love cannot last; it never, never does; but if you marry all this it's for your life. One day, don't forget, you'll be middle-aged and think what that must be like for a woman who can't have, say, a pair of diamond earrings. A woman of my age needs diamonds near her face, to give a sparkle.

I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.

more interesting than white mice—though I must frankly say, of all the mice I ever knew, Brenda was the most utterly dismal." "She was dull," I said, sycophantically. "When I go to London

How lucky I am! I could never have loved anybody else half as much.''I know.''Still, I wish you wouldn't say "I know" like that. You might say that you're lucky too.''I'm awfully nice,' he answered, 'never could you have found anybody as nice as I am.

We had never learnt to dance, and, for some reason, we had supposed it to be a thing which everybody could do quite easily and naturally. I think Linda realized there and then what it took me years to learn, that the behaviour of civilized man really has nothing to do with nature, that all is artificiality and art more or less perfected.

Now rabbits eat their children - somebody ought to explain to them how it's only a complex.

The world is not a bad place, it is a pity to have to die. But, of course, it is only a good place for a very few people. Think of Dachau, think of China, and Czechoslovakia and Spain. Think of the distressed areas. We must die now, and there must be a new world.