Excellent Women Quotes
"You mustn’t mind if I get on with this. Our paper is due to be read soon and there’s a lot to do."
"It seems as if it ought to be the other way round."
"It’s rather nice to think of churches being united through jumble sales."
"People do not always realise that cleaning a bath properly can be quite hard work."
"I suppose it’s still very difficult to find a flat."
"It’s interesting having a different preacher every time—one never knows what will turn up."
"Men love messing about with paint and distemper."
"Mothballs, camphor and so on. I believe it’s perfectly possible to keep the moth at bay."
"Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver, the other gold."
"Oh, rubbish! I never heard such far-fetched excuses."
"Now you ladies, run along. I’ll look after the stall."
"I knew that she was talking about the Napiers."
"The Italians are very forward with women."
"Pinch your bottom they would before you could say knife."
"Did you get some of my home-made sandwich cake, Father?"
"The greater the fall the more poignant the tragedy."
"A little learning is a dangerous thing."
"We are whited sepulchres. We don’t practice what we preach."
"A tolerable wine, Mildred, unpretentious, but I think you will like it."
"I think I must be going home now. Thank you very much for asking me."
"It's surprising the number of people that think that. The holes are made when the beetles come out—that's what it is."
"I should think it’s very important. I know a lot of our furniture at home got the worm in it. There didn’t seem to be anything we could do about it."
"But it’s the fussy spinster in me, the Martha, who could not comfortably sit and make conversation when she knew that yesterday’s unwashed dishes were still in the sink."
"I always did these tidyings on Easter and Whit-Mondays, but somehow not at any other time."
"The people I was going to become friendly with! It made me laugh to think of them and I began playing with the idea of bringing them together."
"I always felt these tidyings on Easter and Whit-Mondays, but somehow not at any other time. It seemed to be connected with fine weather rather than the great Festivals of the Church—a pagan rather than a Christian rite."
"I realised that it was probably how I looked myself and was sad to think that after a year or two he might not remember me either."
"You want to think of yourself a bit more, Miss Lathbury, if you don’t mind me saying so. You’ve done too much for Father Malory and so has Miss Winifred and in the end you both get left, if you’ll excuse me putting it plainly."
"Better by far you should forget and smile, than that you should remember and be sad."
"You make everything into a joke," said Everard resentfully, but with the suspicion of a smile.
"There are always difficulties in human relationships."
"You must think me very impolite, but the worst side of me seems to be coming out today."
"A list of furniture is not a good beginning to a letter."
"There can be no exchange of glances over the telephone, no breaking into laughter."
"One might say that Father Malory's conduct this evening reminds us of the behaviour of Sir Francis Drake, going on and playing bowls when the Armada was sighted."
"Men are not nearly so helpless and pathetic as we sometimes like to imagine them."
"Nothing can ever be really the same when time has passed."
"Where would we be, I’d like to know, if you ladies didn’t keep an eye on us?"
"There's no greater sorrow than to remember happiness in a time of misery."
"One has only to sit in the library of the Learned Society to realize that one's own end can't be so very far off."
"It seemed that husbands and wives could part and come together again, and I was glad that it should be so, but what happened after that?"
"No man is worth this burden. Probably not, but one shouldered it bravely and cheerfully and in the end it might turn out to be not so heavy after all."
"I had a wild idea that I might join the Prehistoric Society, if only I knew how to set about it."
"It is said that people are refined and ennobled by suffering and one knows that they sometimes are."
"There’s sometimes quite a pleasure in secret vice. One can feel really rather wicked and at the same time have the satisfaction of not harming anybody else."
"I was just getting up to put an extraordinarily intelligent and provocative question to the speaker, when I realised that I was nearly home."
"I walked quietly up the stairs, not wanting to meet them yet, but I was just passing what I shall always think of as the Napiers’ kitchen when a sharp but cultured woman’s voice called out, ‘Is that Miss Lathbury?’"