Dodie Smith Quotes

Oh, comfortable cocoa!

How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel!

I have really sinned. I am going to pause now, and sit here on the mound repenting in deepest shame.

I know all about the facts of life, and I don't think much of them.

The tea was a comfort - and by that time I more than needed comfort.

I think it [religion] is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communion all the other arts attempt.

I'm convinced England's overflowing with eccentric people, places, happenings. Indeed, you might say eccentricity's normal in England.

So many of the loveliest things in England are melancholy.

... for I know I shall be interrupted-- I shall want to be, really, because life is too exciting to sit still for long.

Sometimes [the expression] old age has a kind of harrowing beauty. But elderly - ugh!

...surely I could give him--a sort of contentment... That isn't enough to give. Not for the giver.

Oh, wise young judge.

Oh, it is wonderful to wake up in the morning with things to look forward to!

Perhaps what you call conventionality, I call decency.

There was a wonderful atmosphere of gentle age, a smell of flowers and beeswax, sweet yet faintly sour and musty; a smell that makes you feel very tender towards the past.

Perhaps it would really be rather dull to be married and settled for life. Liar! It would be heaven.

Well, my paper has asked me to do a series: Lives of the Great Musicians, reading time 2 minutes.

Ah, but you're the insidious type--Jane Eyre with of touch of Becky Sharp. A thoroughly dangerous girl.

Americans do seem to say things which make the English notice England.

...I have noticed that when things happen in one's imaginings, they never happen in one's life, so I am curbing myself.

Was I the only woman in the world who, at my age - and after a lifetime of quite rampant independence - still did not quite feel grown up?

I was wandering around as usual, in my unpleasantly populated sub-conscious.

Only the margin left to write on now. I love you, I love you, I love you.

If you love people, you take them on trust.

Death is too much to ask of the living.

It's odd how different a house feels when one is alone in it. It makes it easier to think rather private thoughts.

Wakings are the worst times--almost before my eyes are open a great weight seems to roll on my heart.

The one Bach piece I learnt made me feel I was being repeatedly hit on the head with a teaspoon.

I wanted to know more about the young ... strange that though they laughed so loud, they so seldom smiled. Perhaps laughter was involuntary whereas smiling was part of an attitude to life.

... there is something revolting about the way girls' minds so often jump to marriage long before they jump to love. And most of those minds are shut to what marriage really means.

It isn't a bit of use my pretending I'm not crying, because I am... Pause to mop up. Better now.Perhaps it would really be rather dull to be married and settled for life. Liar! It would be heaven.

Cruel blows of fate call for extreme kindness in the family circle.

...I could never explain how the image and the reality merge, and how they somehow extend and beautify each other.

I go backwards and forwards, recapturing the past, wondering about the future—and, most unreasonably, I find myself longing for the past more than for the future.

A mist is rolling over the fields. Why is a summer mist romantic and autumn mist just sad?

Oh, it was an artful place--it must make people who have money want to spend it madly!

A thousand pounds for clothes--when on thinks how long poor people could live on it! When one thinks how long we could live on it, for that matter!

The thought came to me that perhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return - that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness.

I couldn't make it out - why you ever let me, I mean. I understand now. Things like that happen when you're in love with the wrong person. Worse things. Things you never forgive yourself for.

Your pain and anger will pass, but the guilt would remain with you for always.

I have really sinned. I am going to pause now, and sit here on the mound repenting in deepest shame...

...[I]f I don't get going soon, the whole impetus may die---and if that happens, well, I really shall consider a long, restful plunge into insanity. Sometimes the abyss yawns very attractively.

...[P]erhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return---that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness.

No, that was my privilege.

When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting

When I imagine changing places with her I get the feeling I do on finishing a novel with a brick-wall happy ending---I mean the kind of ending when you never think any more about the characters.