Favourite Quotes, Lines and Sentences

 

 Words to make you think, laugh or cry

I’ve done a number of theme posts recently – see list in the tab above – and thinking about my 12 years and 2500 posts of blogging, I was struck with the simple idea of featuring  some favourite quotes – just sentences I liked in my reading. (Like a young Victorian miss with an album). I came up with the list below very quickly, and on another day would think of more or different ones, but I am very much hoping readers will suggest their own favourites. These are random – please make your contributions equally so. Lines to make you laugh, or cry, or think…

 

1)  When I wrote about Guy Cullingford’s 1950s book Conjuror’s Coffin I said this: I was unexpectedly touched by this line near the end about a dying man:

‘Is there anything I can do for you?’

‘… five bob each way… on Redemption..?’

This scene takes place outside the real-life lovely church of St Patrick’s in Soho Square in London. Redemption is always possible.

2)  Eva Ibbotson has a character in her Madensky Square say this in her hat shop, as illo above:

She wants a better world for the poor and oppressed — and she wants to look pretty while she’s getting it — and don’t we all?

Which I often think could be the motto for Clothes in Books.

(Eva Ibbotson is also responsible for a Guardian piece that I pull out and send around from time to time – it’s one of the nicest true stories you could ever read, it’s about libraries and refugees, and is intensely charming. Thanks also to blogfriend Susanna Tayler, who first pointed it out to me.)

 

3 This line from James Thurber’s Southern Gothic parody will never not make me laugh:

Old Nate Birge… was chewing on a splinter of wood and watching the moon come up lazily out of the old cemetery in which nine of his daughters were lying, only two of whom were dead.

In part because I like writing about graves and graveyards, so am forever quoting it. Recently here and here, also in my Guardian article about digging up bodies.

 

4 Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey is one of my favourite crime books, and I have written about it extensively – for example in my recent post on Motives, and also in an essay for the Edgar-nominated Murder in the Closet. (Why yes I did go to New York for the Edgar ceremony, thank you for asking). But there is one (fairly irrelevant) moment in it that I always enjoy and I don’t think have mentioned. One of the pupils at the teacher training college is explaining beef between 2 x students to Lucy Pym

‘There is also some personal reason for the quarrel, I understand. Something about abused hospitality.’

‘You mean that one went home for the holidays with the other and – misbehaved?’ Visions of vamped lover, stolen spoons and cigarette burns on the furniture ran through Lucy’s too vivid imagination.

‘Oh no it happened more than 200 years ago. In the deep snow, and there was a massacre.’

The two young women concerned are called Campbell and Macdonald: the shadow of Glencoe reaches far.

 

5 After I described a visit to the grave of WB Yeats in Co Sligo in Ireland, an online comment was

‘Nothing says fun holiday outing like a visit to a dead poet’s grave.’

Indeed. Now our family motto.

 

6 From Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair:

Death never mattered at those times—in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the watching her torch trail across to the opposite side of the Common like the tail-light of a slow car driving away.

 

7 A very recent addition – from Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits:

…and it seems to me a soft and delicate thing.

‘He believed the world a wounded thing that can only be healed by story.’

 

8 Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford, the foundation of the blog:

Louisa was married in the spring. Her wedding dress was short to the knee and had a train, as was the hideous fashion then. [Her sister] Jassy got very worked up about it.

‘So unsuitable.’

‘Why, Jassy?’

‘To be buried in, I mean. Women are always buried in their wedding dresses aren’t they? Think of your poor old dead legs sticking out.’

I always had a very clear picture of that wedding dress, and ‘Your poor old dead legs’ is a phrase that will never not make me laugh. And I started this blog to illustrate it.

9 Not a novel, not about clothes, just my all-time favourite line from a recipe, from Peg Bracken’s I Hate to Cook book:

Add the flour, salt, paprika and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink.

 

10 Bridget Jones, forever nailing Christmas in your 20s, and another one I bring out every year:

Tuesday 3 January: 9am. Ugh. Cannot face thought of going to work… It seems wrong and unfair that Christmas, with its stressful and unmanageable financial and emotional challenges, should first be forced upon one wholly against one’s will, then rudely snatched away just when one is starting to get into it. Was really beginning to enjoy the feeling that normal service was suspended and it was OK to lie in bed as long as you want, put anything you fancy into your mouth, and drink alcohol whenever it should chance to pass your way, even in the mornings. Now suddenly we are all supposed to snap into self-discipline like lean teenage greyhounds.

 

Please bring out a favourite quote in the comments below – no guidelines, no rules, no themes - just a sentence or two that you like, or pops into your mind on a regular basis.