Quotes from Jan Struther

And I am a mockery, who was God before.

Mrs. Miniver suddenly understood why she was enjoying the forties so much better than she had enjoyed the thirties: it was the difference between August and October, between the heaviness of late summer and the sparkle of early autumn, between the ending of an old phase and the beginning of a fresh one.

F]ireworks had for her a direct and magical appeal. Their attraction was more complex than that of any other form of art. They had pattern and sequence, colour and sound, brilliance and mobility; they had suspense, surprise, and a faint hint of danger; above all, they had the supreme quality of transience, which puts the keenest edge on beauty and makes it touch some spring in the heart which more enduring excellences cannot reach.

A single person is a manageable entity, whom you can either make friends with or leave alone. But half of a married couple is not exactly a whole human being: if the marriage is successful it is something a little more than that; if unsuccessful, a little less. In either case, a fresh complication is added to the already intricate business of friendship: as Clem had once remarked, you might as well try to dance a tarantella with a Siamese twin.

This was the cream of marriage, this nightly turning out of the day's pocketful of memories, this deft habitual sharing of two pairs of eyes, two pairs of ears. It gave you, in a sense, almost a double life: though never, on the other hand, quite a single one.

T]he mechanics of life should never be allowed to interfere with living.

Left wing...Right wing...it's so limited; why doesn't it ever occur to any of them that what one is really longing for is the wishbone?

Not that she didn't enjoy the holidays: but she always felt—and it was, perhaps, the measure of her peculiar happiness—a little relieved when they were over. Her normal life pleased her so well that she was half afraid to step out of its frame in case one day she should find herself unable to get back.

It was more like a form of claustrophobia -- a dread of exchanging the freedom of her own self-imposed routine for the inescapable burden of somebody else's.

It oughtn't to need a war to make us talk to each other in buses, and invent our own amusements in the evenings, and live simply, and eat sparingly, and recover the use of our legs, and get up early enough to see the sun rise. However, it has needed one: which is about the severest criticism our civilization could have.

It oughtn't to need a war to make us talk to each other in buses, and invent our own amusements in the evenings, and live simply, and eat sparingly, and recover the use of our legs, and get up early enough to see the sun rise.

A] certain degree of un-understanding (not mis-, but un-) is the only possible sanctuary which one human being can offer to another in the midst of the devastating intimacy of a happy marriage.

Clem Miniver: She was a good cook, as good cooks go. And as good cooks go, she went.

Clem caught her eye across the table. It seemed to her sometimes that the most important thing about marriage was not a home or children or a remedy against sin, but simply there being always an eye to catch.

She reached her doorstep. The key turned sweetly in the lock. That was the kind of thing one remembered about a house: not the size of the rooms or the color of the walls, but the feel of the door-handles and light-switches, the shape and texture of the banister-rail under one's palm; minute tactual intimacies, whose resumption was the essence of coming home.

Not that he disliked school; but it had to be regarded, he found, as another life, to be approached only by way of the Styx. You died on the station platform, were reborn, not without pangs, in the train, and emerged at the other end a different person, with a different language, a different outlook, and a different scale of values.

She saw every relationship as a pair of intersecting circles. The more they intersected, it would seem at first glance, the better the relationship; but this is not so. Beyond a certain point the law of diminishing returns sets in, and there aren't enough private resources left on either side to enrich the life that is shared. Probably perfection is reached when the area of the two outer crescents, added together, is exactly equal to that of the leaf-shaped piece in the middle.

Y]ou cannot successfully navigate the future unless you keep always framed beside it a small clear image of the past.

That's what any decent mind ought to do for its owner when she lets it off the leash - just go bounding away into the long grass and bring back a really profound thought, laying it at her feet all furry and palpitating. C'mon now. Hey los'!

And it will matter little, in after days, Whether this twig, or that, kindled the blaze.

That would be no less shrewd: for when you first come home from a strange place you are always something of a ghost. They were sorry when you went away, and they welcome you back with affection: but in the meanwhile they have adjusted their lives a little to your absence.

Hansi, after a day or two's distant politeness, had taken her by the hand and led her to a row of curiously-shaped pebbles in a secret hiding-place between the wood-stacks. "Meine Sammlung," he said briefly. "My election," echoed Toby's voice in her memory. Her heart turned over: how could there be this ridiculous talk of war, when little boys in all countries collected stones, dodged cleaning their teeth, and hated cauliflower?

Freedom Now heaven be thanked, I am out of love again! I have been long a slave, and now am free; I have been tortured, and am eased of pain; I have been blind, and now my eyes can see; I have been lost, and now the way lies plain; I have been caged, and now I hold the key; I have been mad, and now at last am sane; I am wholly I, that was but a half of me. So, a free man, my dull proud path I plod, Who, tortured, blind, mad, caged, was once a God.

Mrs. Miniver put the last sheet back on top of the others and clipped them all together again. No, she could not possibly throw them away: they contained too much of her life. Besides, however clear one's memories seemed to be, it did one no harm to polish them up from time to time. One is what one remembers: no more, no less.