Quotes from Stella Gibbons

She liked to watch her father as he read, and to listen to the smoothly rolling tones; she felt no curiosity about what the words meant. It was only Shakespeare and she was used to him.

In fact, she behaved like most of us do when in love; she never thought of her beloved as a human being at all, but only as an image upon which to drape dreams.

One of the disadvantages of almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one's favourite writers. It gave one a curious feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one's dressing gown.

though it was too true that life as she is lived has a way of being curiously different from life as described by novelists.

Only a person with a candid mind, who is usually bored by intrigues, can appreciate the full fun of an intrigue when they begin to manage one for the first time. If there are several intrigues and there is a certain danger of their getting mixed up and spoiling each other, the enjoyment is even keener.

she came to the conclusion that if Aunt Ada was mad, then she, Flora, was one of the Marx Brothers.

Persons of Aunt Ada's temperament were not fond of a tidy life. Storms were what they liked; plenty of rows, and doors being slammed, and jaws sticking out, and faces white with fury, and faces brooding in corners, and faces making unnecessary fuss at breakfast, and plenty of opportunities for gorgeous emotional wallowings, and partings for ever, and misunderstandings, and interferings, and spyings, and, above all, managing and intriguing. Oh, they did enjoy themselves!

His thoughts swirled like a beck in spate behind the sodden grey furrows of his face. A woman … Blast! Blast! Come to wrest away from him the land whose love fermented in his veins like slow yeast.

Aunt Ada was most emphatically one of the Substances not Included in the Outline.

Unless everything is tidy and pleasant and comfortable all about one, people cannot even begin to enjoy life. I cannot endure messes.

Green fingers was the country name for time, patience and love working together.

By now Flora was really cross. Surely she had endured enough for one evening without having to listen to intelligent conversation? Here

An interesting survival of mediaeval superstition," commented Flora.

There you are, you see. It's no use. You've chosen to be a married person. You mustn't expect to lead the life of a bachelor.' 'But

Flora pressed Rennett's hand graciously, and congratulated her upon her striking toilette, which had been borrowed from one of Mr Mybug's girl friends who drank rather a lot in one way and another and kept a tame boxer in her studio for the sheer love of the thing.

I don't think I shall marry if I'm asked. There's too much occupational risk.

Hetty was eating, rather than reading, large slabs of a very thin book of contemporary verse each page having a thick wodge of print, without capital letters, starting at the top and running nearly to the bottom. Her eyes were very close to the book and she frowned with concentration.

For Mr. Somers was one of those atheists whose disbelief in God is livelier than the faith of most believers; he not only disbelieved in God, he actively disliked Him, spoke of Him rather as if He were a disagreeable old man living next door, and regarded all human progress as a series of, so to speak, smacks in the eye for the Almighty.

Human beings: except inasmuch as they provided material for writers, what a bloody nuisance they were.

She felt that if she had to spend another year of interesting, congenial work during the days, and sensitive, cultured, intelligent talk in the evenings, she would go mad or die.

Don't fuss, Mary. I will write the letters tomorrow, before lunch. I would write them tonight, only I think we ought to dine out - don't you? - to celebrate the inauguration of my career as a parasite.

Surely psychoanalysis was the greatest kill-joy of the delicious pangs of love since the Church had ceased to thunder.

The splendid rewards of life had marched by without sweeping him into their army of happily fulfilled beings;

She could not be said to dislike Colonel Trumpet so much as not to notice he was there.