Quotes from Enid Bagnold

I know I feel like Gulliver sometimes, weighed down by little men. There are so many people in this house, I'm a queen bee, with every muscle dragging. I'm the heart of a cluster, black, dripping, sucking, hanging.

But now, at the table, behind the fall of the tablecloth, behind the sheath of skin, hanging head downwards between cliffs of bone, was the baby, its arms all but clasped about its neck, its face aslant upon its arms, hair painted upon its skull, closed, secret eyes, a diver poised in albumen, ancient and epic, shot with delicate spasms, as old as Pharaoh in its tomb.

They went together to the pond. The frogs, frozen by the movement, sat still. Fourteen golden eyes like nuggets gleamed unwinking from the margin. Some squatted on dead reeds and immersed branches. Tranced by the half-apprehended movement above them they relied for safety upon immobility. Some hung by one slim hand like children to a raft. All had been stricken to stone by the human appearance. Only the sun, shifting in the sky, tickled the fire in the nuggets in their green heads.

She saw herself alone, alive and doomed, strong and helpless, passing in a line of women, her mother before her, the child Lucy, behind, women walking on a temple frieze, Greek women in fluttering robes rounding a vase's girth for ever.

A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again.

He was white in bold seas, ans black in continents...

Can you understand when I tell you that you owe me nothing? That to have a child is an account which is settled on the spot

If it upsets you better not recall it." --The Chalk Garden, a play by Enid Bagnold, 1953/1956

If it upsets you better not recall it." --from The Chalk Garden

The dangerous thing about hate is that it seems so reasonable." --from The Chalk Garden

What shall you do?" "I shall continue to explore—the astonishment of living!

That is why a garden is a good lesson….so much dies in it. And so often.

The dangerous thing about hate is that it seems so reasonable.

If it upsets you better not recall it.

There is nothing so difficult to remember as sexual love. How often, where, and what happened? It all goes, it has all gone, leaving no impression, mattering so much less than we like to think. (…) What we have had we have had, and, pleased, we pass along. (But what we haven't had may well be a ticklish business!)

Far down the corridor a slim figure in white approaches, dwarfed by the smoky distance; her nun-like cap floating, her scarlet cape, the "cape of pride," slipped round her narrow shoulders. How intent and silent They are! I watched this one pass with a look half reverence, half envy. One should never aspire to know a Sister intimately. They are disappointing people; without candour, without imagination. Yet what a look of personality hangs about them....

The Mess went vilely tonight. Sister adds up on her fingers, and that's fatal, so all the numbers were out, and the chef sent in forty-five meats instead of fifty-one. I blushed with horror and responsibility, standing there watching six hungry men pretending to be philosophers. The sergeant wolfed the cheese too. He got it out from under my very eyes while I was clearing the tables and ate it, standing up to it in the pantry with his back to me when I went in to fetch a tray.

When a man dies they fetch him with a stretcher, just as he came in; only he enters with a blanket over him, and a flag covers him as he goes out. When he came in he was one of a convoy, but every man who can stand rises to his feet as he goes out. Then they play him to his funeral, to a grass mound at the back of the hospital.

After a wet and muddy day in London I've seen the trains pull into Charing Cross with snow piled on the roofs of the carriages, and felt a foot taller for joy that I was one of those fortunate who might step into a train and go down into a white countryside.

By seven o'clock even the long corridor was as dim as the alley outside. No one thought of shutting the windows - I doubt whether they will shut...and the fog rolled over the sill in banks and round the open glass doors, till even the white cap of a Sister could hardly be seen as she passed.

Things come suitable to the time.

Judges don't age time decorates them.

When a man goes through six years training to be a doctor he will never be the same. He knows too much.

But I had been in love pretty often and I didn't think it stood the wear and tear.