Quotes from Nancy Mitford

always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair they loved or they loathed, they lived in a world of superlatives

She was filled with a strange, wild, unfamiliar happiness, and knew that this was love. Twice in her life she had mistaken something else for it; it was like seeing somebody in the street who you think is a friend, you whistle and wave and run after him, but it is not only not the friend, but not even very like him. A few minutes later the real friend appears in view, and then you can't imagine how you ever mistook that other person for him.

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

You've no idea how long life goes on and how many, many changes it brings. Young people seem to imagine that it's over in a flash, that they do this thing, or that thing, and then die, but I can assure you they are quite wrong.

But I think she would have been happy with Fabrice,' I said. 'He was the great love of her life, you know.' Oh, dulling,' said my mother, sadly. 'One always thinks that. Every, every time.

Life itself, she thought, as she went upstairs to dress for dinner, was stranger than dreams and far, far more disordered.

To fall in love you have to be in the state of mind for it to take, like a disease.

The worst of being a Communist is the parties you may go to are - well - awfully funny and touching but not very gay...I don't see the point of sad parties, do you? And Left-wing people are always sad because they mind dreadfully about their causes, and the causes are always going so badly.

He was the great love of her life you know.' 'Oh, dulling,' said my mother, sadly, 'One always thinks that. Every, every time.

Even if I take him out for three hours every day, and go and chat to him for another hour, that leaves twenty hours for him all alone with nothing to do. Oh, why can't dogs read?

Oh dear... it really is rather disillusioning. When one's friends marry for money they are wretched, when they marry for love it is worse. What is the proper thing to marry for, I should like to know?

Always be civil to the girls, you never know who they may marry' is a aphorism which has saved many an English spinster from being treated like an Indian widow.

I have often noticed that when women look at themselves in every reflection, and take furtive peeps into their looking-glasses, it is hardly ever, as is generally supposed, from vanity, but much more often from a feeling that all is not quite as it should be

Oh! How like a woman," Davey said. "Sex, my dear Sadie, is not a sovereign cure for everything, you know. I only wish it were.

It was furnished neither in good taste nor in bad taste, but simply with no attempt at taste at all...

I am sometimes bored by people, but never by life.

One's emotions are intensified in Paris—one can be more happy and also more unhappy here than in any other place. But it is always a positive source of joy to live here, and there is nobody so miserable as a Parisian in exile from his town.

Linda's presentation of the 'facts' had been so gruesome that the children left Alconleigh howling dismally, their nerves permanently impaired, their future chances of a sane and happy sex life much reduced.

Madame de Pompadour excelled at an art which the majority of human beings thoroughly despise because it is unprofitable and ephemeral: the art of living.

Mother, of course, takes a lot of exercise, walks and so on. And every morning she puts on a pair of black silk drawers and a sweater and makes indelicate gestures on the lawn. That's called Building the Body Beautiful. She's mad about it.

There they are, held like flies in the amber of that moment—click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from that happiness and promise of youth, from the hopes Aunt Sadie must have had for them, and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves. I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.

Oh, the spectacles - I have to wear them when I go abroad, I have such kind eyes you see, beggars and things cluster round and annoy me.