Quotes from Celia Fremlin

Hope lights up our darkness.

Infatuation means, 'A love that it is inconvenient to go on with.

The only really satisfactory confidante for your troubles is someone who enjoys them, and this inevitably cuts out anyone who actually loves you.

They give her tractors and things to play with instead of dolls, just to prove that girls are exactly the same as boys. Mind you, they're a bit illogical, it seems to me, because they have never forced me to play with dolls, which I would have thought would have proved the point just as effectively.

Love isn't relevant once things are really bad. They say love makes the world go round-but it doesn't, you know. Love is a luxury, and you indulge in it when things are OK. As soon as they are bad-really bad-there just isn't a place for it anymore-no place where there could be room for it

The beautiful, the inessential, must be given priority if it was to exist at all.

A man's character, she reflected with surprise, consists a good deal more of the way people feel and behave towards him than of the way he himself feels and behaves.

In these days there are few sights more terrifying than that of a well-dressed man with a notebook looking at a piece of land.

It was high time Ivor got moving. It wasn't fair to be dead and yet to hang around like this, in every room, in every corner of the house….There ought to be something like a fly-spray, a fly-spray for ghosts, a ghost-spray….

Quarrelling could do more damage to the appearance of a house than a party for fifty people, all drunk.

Man can't live by truth alone, you know, and children even less so.

What a pity men didn't gossip about their wives the way women did about their husbands, then they would soon learn that their own wife wasn't the only one with shortcomings….

If you went on neglecting your own tastes like this, did you, in the end, cease to have any tastes? Cease, in fact, to be a person at all, and become merely a labour-saving gadget around the house?