Quotes from Nancy Mitford

Sophia poured out tea, and asked after his Lesbian irises. 'They were not what they seemed,' he said, 'wretched things. I brought the roots all the way from Lesbos, as you know, and when they came up, what were they? Mere pansies. Too mortifying.

Sure enough, standing with their backs to the hall fire, were Aunt Sadie, Aunt Emily, and a small, fair, and apparently young man. My immediate impression was that he did not seem at all like a husband. He looked kind and gentle.

My companion, with that look of concentration which comes over French faces when a meal is in the offing, did not wait to hear any of this.

I never saw Sauveterre again and it was to be many years before I even heard his name, but in the end I found myself adopting his little boy, so small is the world, so strange is fate.

became a duchess, however, the rage of

Childbirth, said Sally, is an unpleasing process. It must be quite awful for the father who, according to Walter, suffers even more than the mother. I don't quite understand about that, but of course I take his word for it.

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.

All right, keep your hair on,' said the old singer, taking his off and adjusting a curl. 'Have another drink'.

Sophia feared that divorce, re-marriage, and subsequent poverty would not bring out the best in her character.

Air raid warning Yellow', she had experienced the unhealthy glow of excitement that she might easily become a air raid addict, or take to air raids in the same way that people do to drugs, and for much the same reason.

His general attitude to what he called the man in the street was that he ought constantly to be covered by machine-guns; this having become impossible, owing to the weakness, in the past, of the great Whig families, he must be doped into submission with the fiction that huge reforms, to be engineered by the Conservative party, were always just round the next corner. Like this he could be kept quiet indefinitely, as long as there was no war.

An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off: it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.

Americans relate all effort, all work, and all of life itself to the dollar. Their talk is of nothing but dollars.

There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment. To fall in love you have to be in the state of mind for it to take, like a disease.

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

I have only ever read one book in my life, and that is White Fang. It's so frightfully good I've never bothered to read another.

I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.

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

I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened.

I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.

If I had a girl I should say to her, 'Marry for love if you can, it won't last, but it is a very interesting experience and makes a good beginning in life. Later on, when you marry for money, for heaven's sake let it be big money. There are no other possible reasons for marrying at all.

Life is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake, and here is one of them.

The trouble is that people seem to expect happiness in life. I can't imagine why; but they do. They are unhappy before they marry, and they imagine to themselves that the reason of their unhappiness will be removed when they are married. When it isn't they blame the other person, which is clearly absurd. I believe that is what generally starts the trouble.

Sun, silence, and happiness.