The Pursuit Of Love Quotes
"Some novelists emerge, as if from the head of Zeus, with their talents fully formed, their distinctive styles already in place."
"The jokes are peerless, yes. I doubt I shall ever tire of reading Linda’s horrified account of housekeeping."
"Beneath the brittle surface of this novel’s wit there is something infinitely more melancholy at work."
"This voice is not actually a voice, of course; it is the illusion of a voice, painstakingly created in prose."
"You cannot tinker with their syntax or vocabulary without irrevocably harming the result."
"I always thought they were the same thing, but Christian likes this one because he threw a bomb at the King of Spain; you must say it’s romantic."
"If she is flippant about political causes, she is not, in any obvious way, earnest about her characters either."
"She tends to keep her protagonists at a coolly amused distance."
"Mitford’s humour often flirts with facetiousness, it does not, in the end, I think, represent a dismissal of ‘life’s profundities’."
"There they are, held like flies, in the amber of that moment – click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from that happiness and promise of youth."
"I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups."
"I adored all my cousins, and Linda distilled, mentally and physically, the very essence of the Radlett family."
"It never seemed to occur to Uncle Matthew that Matt could not know these words by nature."
"The Radletts loved animals, they loved foxes, they risked dreadful beatings in order to unstop their earths, they read and cried and rejoiced over Reynard the Fox."
"The humanitarian activities of the Hons were forbidden, on pain of punishment, by Uncle Matthew, who was always and entirely on the side of Craven, his favourite servant."
"I felt that I couldn’t bear another moment of this misery, and yet I knew I must bear another five miles, another forty minutes."
"Miss Linda, takes after her ladyship something wonderful."
"I shook hands in the abrupt graceless way of little girls of fourteen, and thought that he did not seem at all like a captain either."
"Can’t see him killing Germans with an entrenching tool."
"Still, he looks rather nice to know, and, considering her age, I should think she’s lucky to get anybody."
"He’s such a frightfully clever cove, literary you know, you wouldn’t believe the things he does."
"Oh, it imposes a most fearful strain on the juices, you might as well eat leather."
"Poor Aunt Emily, perhaps he’ll make her keep him in the stables."
"No, thank you, no twice-cooked meat. I am a wretched invalid, I must be careful, or I pay."
"Legs like gateposts from playing hockey, and the worst seat on a horse of any woman I ever knew."
"So in the end, Hens will be Hons and Hons will be Hens. Oh, how I should love to live in a dear little Hon-house."
"You wouldn’t like your work," said Bob. "I once saw a hen laying an egg, and she had a most terrible expression on her face."
"Once a Hun always a Hun," said Uncle Matthew, "and I'm not too set on bankers myself."
"Darling, darling Mummie," said Linda, "the meet's at Cock's Barn, and you know how one can't resist."
"You are a most beautiful rider, you know. Good night, when I'm back in Oxford I'll ring you up."
"Patience again. If this comes out he is thinking of me now this very minute – if this comes out he'll ring up tomorrow – if this comes out he'll be at the meet."
"You are lucky not to know any [important people]."
"It never seemed to dawn upon the Alconleighs that respect is not an attitude of mind indulged in by modern young men, who look for other qualities in their wives than respectability."
"Love is for grown-up people, as you will discover one day. You will also discover that it has nothing to do with marriage."
"There is no more popular unit in London society than a young, beautiful, but perfectly respectable woman who can be asked to dinner without her husband."
"The unfailing attraction of vitality and high spirits."
"Linda gives one so much pleasure; she is like a bunch of flowers."
"Linda believes in love; she is passionately romantic."
"A perfect mountain of pomposity, more like his father every day."
"The trouble with you is you don’t know the lower classes and you don’t belong to the upper classes, you’re just a rich foreigner who happens to live here."
"Real love and happiness had once more eluded her."
"Communism seems to eat up all one's life and energy."
"Foreigners are greatly given, I believe, to rape."
"Happiness and Christian were still linked together in her mind at this time."
"Parting with her would have been no death blow to either of her husbands; on the contrary, they would both have turned with relief to a much preferred mistress, who was more suited to them in every way."
"The office was a large shed with a yard round it."
"Spaniards have a highly developed sense of human dignity."
"She was now looking upon the authentic face of love, and she knew it, but it frightened her."
"She tried to remember how she had felt when she had first loved her two husbands."
"It seemed most unfair. Had she remained alive her prettiness would surely, after fifteen years of marriage, have faded away, her correctness have become a bore; dead, she was embalmed for ever in her youth, her beauty, and her gentillesse."
"But there was something about the way he looked at her which seemed to be depriving her of all balance."
"She was profoundly shocked, and, at the same time, intensely excited."
"You've looked," said Linda sulkily. "Very clever."
"I shall pay for this," he said, with a devil-may-care smile, "but never mind, one's not in Paris every day."
"Never, never let me go back to them," Linda suddenly threw herself into his arms.
"If you promise to do what I tell you, you may stay here for a time."
"I never want to leave you again as long as I live."
"My darling – but you love them. Mummy and Fa, Matt and Robin and Victoria and Fanny. What is all this?"
"I had a friend, when I lived in Paris, who had a boa constrictor as a pet, and this boa constrictor got itself inside a French horn."
"However much taste may change, it always follows a stereotyped plan."
"Don't tease, Dave. I'm so happy you can't think."
"A tiny drop doesn’t stink out the whole room."
"It’s quite plain already that you and I will have to."
"Oh, doctors! They don’t know anything, they are such fearful idiots."
"I reckon we shall be able to stop them for two hours – possibly three – before we are all killed."
"The lives of women like Linda and me are not so much fun when one begins to grow older."