Quotes from Stella Gibbons

But she had a lively acquaintaince with confinement through the works of women novelists, especially those of the unmarried ones.

She could feel magic in the quiet spring day, like a sorcerer's far-off voice, and lines of poetry floated over her mind as if they were strands of spider-web.

Daisies opened in sly lust to the sun-rays and rain-spears, and eft-flies, locked in a blind embrace, spun radiantly through the glutinous light to their ordained death.

Mrs. Smiling's second interest was her collection of brassieres, and her search for the perfect one. She was reputed to have the largest and finest collection of these garments in the world. It was hoped that on her death it would be left to the nation.

He was enmeshed in his grief. He did not notice that Graceless's leg had come off and that she was managing as best she could with three.

Is there a rug?' she asked, hanging fire. 'Nay. The sins burnin' in yer marrow will keep yer warm.

Mrs Poste, who had wished people to live beautiful lives and yet be ladies and gentlemen.

Flora had also learned the degraded art of 'tasting' unread books, and now, whenever her skimming eye lit on a phrase about heavy shapes, or sweat, or howls or bedposts, she just put the book back on the shelf, unread.

Coward! Liar! Libertine! Who were you with last night? Moll at the mill or Violet at the vicarage? Or Ivy, perhaps, at the ironmongery?

Cautious as a camera-man engaged in shooting a family of fourteen lions

While she lay there with these old worn thoughts coming obediently into her mind, called there by habit and the familiar quiet of early morning, she was aware that at the back of her mind there was another thought that was not at all stale, but so fresh that it was nearly a feeling, with all a feeling's delicious power to kill thought.

After another minute Reuben brought forth the following sentence: 'I ha' scranleted two hundred furrows come five o'clock down i' the bute.' It was a difficult remark, Flora felt, to which to reply. Was

The trouble about Mr Mybug was that ordinary subjects, which are not usually associated with sex even by our best minds, did suggest sex to Mr Mybug, and he pointed them out and made comparisons and asked Flora what she thought about it all.

The flies buzzed in answer above the dirty water standing in the washbasin, in which floated a solitary black hair. It, too, was like life-- and as meaningless.

the Starkadders rarely did what was obvious though they were only too embarrassingly ready to do what was natural.

Ye know, doan't ye, what it feels like when ye burn yer hand in takin' a cake out of the oven or wi' a match when ye're lightin' one of they godless cigarettes? Ay. It stings wi' a fearful pain, doan't it? And ye run away to clap a bit o' butter on it to take the pain away. Ah, but' (an impressive pause) 'there 'll be no butter in hell!

His young man's limbs, sleek in their dark male pride, seemed to disdain the covering offered them by the brief shorts and striped jersey. His body might have been naked, like his full, muscled throat, which rose, round and proud as the male organ of a flower, from the neck of his sweater.

On the whole, Cold Comfort was not without its promise of mystery and excitement.

For it is a peculiarity of persons who lead rich, emotional lives, and who (as the saying is) live intensely and with a wild poetry, that they read all kinds of meanings into comparatively simple actions, especially the actions of other people, who do not live intensely and with a wild poetry.

You know how dreadful intelligent people are when you take them to dances.

Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as  Persuasion, but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, 'Collecting material'. No one can object to that. Besides, so I shall be.

The farmhouse itself no longer looked like a beast about to spring. (Not that it ever had, to her, for she was not in the habit of thinking that things looked exactly like other things which were as different from them in appearance as it was possible to be.)

Send clean socks. Love to all except Micah.

Flora sighed. It was curious that persons who lived what the novelists call a rich emotional life always seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake.