Nancy Mitford Quotes

I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.

I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened.

Life is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake, and here is one of them.

If I had a girl I should say to her, 'Marry for love if you can, it won't last, but it is a very interesting experience and makes a good beginning in life. Later on, when you marry for money, for heaven's sake let it be big money. There are no other possible reasons for marrying at all.

always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair they loved or they loathed, they lived in a world of superlatives

Sun, silence, and happiness.

My dear Lady Kroesig, I have only read one book in my life, and that is ‘White Fang.’ It’s so frightfully good I’ve never bothered to read another.

Life itself, she thought, as she went upstairs to dress for dinner, was stranger than dreams and far, far more disordered.

To fall in love you have to be in the state of mind for it to take, like a disease.

The trouble is that people seem to expect happiness in life. I can't imagine why; but they do. They are unhappy before they marry, and they imagine to themselves that the reason of their unhappiness will be removed when they are married. When it isn't they blame the other person, which is clearly absurd. I believe that is what generally starts the trouble.

But I think she would have been happy with Fabrice,' I said. 'He was the great love of her life, you know.' Oh, dulling,' said my mother, sadly. 'One always thinks that. Every, every time.

Even if I take him out for three hours every day, and go and chat to him for another hour, that leaves twenty hours for him all alone with nothing to do. Oh, why can't dogs read?

He was the great love of her life you know.' 'Oh, dulling,' said my mother, sadly, 'One always thinks that. Every, every time.

You've no idea how long life goes on and how many, many changes it brings. Young people seem to imagine that it's over in a flash, that they do this thing, or that thing, and then die, but I can assure you they are quite wrong.

Always be civil to the girls, you never know who they may marry' is a aphorism which has saved many an English spinster from being treated like an Indian widow.

Twice in her life she had mistaken something else for it; it was like seeing somebody in the street who you think is a friend, you whistle and wave and run after him, and it is not only not the friend, but not even very like him. A few minutes later the real friend appears in view, and then you can't imagine how you ever mistook that other person for him. Linda was now looking upon the authentic face of love, and she knew it, but it frightened her. That it should come so casually, so much by a series of accidents, was frightening.

It was furnished neither in good taste nor in bad taste, but simply with no attempt at taste at all...

The worst of being a Communist is the parties you may go to are - well - awfully funny and touching but not very gay...I don't see the point of sad parties, do you? And Left-wing people are always sad because they mind dreadfully about their causes, and the causes are always going so badly.

Oh dear... it really is rather disillusioning. When one's friends marry for money they are wretched, when they marry for love it is worse. What is the proper thing to marry for, I should like to know?

She was filled with a strange, wild, unfamiliar happiness, and knew that this was love. Twice in her life she had mistaken something else for it; it was like seeing somebody in the street who you think is a friend, you whistle and wave and run after him, but it is not only not the friend, but not even very like him. A few minutes later the real friend appears in view, and then you can’t imagine how you ever mistook that other person for him.

Oh! How like a woman," Davey said. "Sex, my dear Sadie, is not a sovereign cure for everything, you know. I only wish it were.

Oh, the spectacles - I have to wear them when I go abroad, I have such kind eyes you see, beggars and things cluster round and annoy me.

I have often noticed that when women look at themselves in every reflection, and take furtive peeps into their looking-glasses, it is hardly ever, as is generally supposed, from vanity, but much more often from a feeling that all is not quite as it should be

The charm of your writing,” Evelyn Waugh once wrote to Mitford, “depends on your refusal to recognize a distinction between girlish chatter and literary language.

Madame de Pompadour excelled at an art which the majority of human beings thoroughly despise because it is unprofitable and ephemeral: the art of living.

I am sometimes bored by people, but never by life.

One's emotions are intensified in Paris—one can be more happy and also more unhappy here than in any other place. But it is always a positive source of joy to live here, and there is nobody so miserable as a Parisian in exile from his town.

Linda's presentation of the 'facts' had been so gruesome that the children left Alconleigh howling dismally, their nerves permanently impaired, their future chances of a sane and happy sex life much reduced.

As far as I am concerned, all reading is for pleasure.

Women are divided into two categories: those who can deal with the men they are in love with, and those who cannot. Sophia was one of those who can.

Love indeed - whoever invented love ought to be shot.

Mother, of course, takes a lot of exercise, walks and so on. And every morning she puts on a pair of black silk drawers and a sweater and makes indelicate gestures on the lawn. That's called Building the Body Beautiful. She's mad about it.

Do you always laugh when you make love?' said Fabrice. I hadn't thought about it, but I suppose I do. I generally laugh when I'm happy and cry when I'm not. Do you find it odd?

The Radletts were always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair; their emotions were on no ordinary plane, they loved or they loathed, they laughed or they cried, they lived in a world of superlatives.

There they are, held like flies, in the amber of that moment...

Men, in general, are so treacherous, so envious, and so cruel that it is a comfort to find one who is only weak.

It's a funny thing that people are always quite ready to admit it if they've no talent for drawing or music, whereas everyone imagines that they themselves are capable of true love, which is a talent like any other, only far more rare.

She belonged to that rare and objectionable species, the intellectual snob devoid of intellect.

And Left-wing people are always sad because they mind dreadfully about their causes, and the causes are always going so badly.

She...ran away so often, and with so many different people, that she became known to her family and friends as the Bolter....

It was the very worst kind of Banbury-Road house, depressing, with laurels. The front door was opened by a slut. I had never seen a slut before but recognized the genus without difficulty as soon as I set eyes on this one.

Just at the moment he's writing a book on famine - goodness! it's sad - and there's a dear little Chinese comrade who comes and tells him what famine is like, you never saw such a fat man in your life.

Nobody ought to write books before they’re thirty. I hate precocity.

I have only ever read one book in my life, and that is White Fang. It's so frightfully good I've never bothered to read another.

Oh my past! It’s such a long time ago now.

Wrapped in her mink bedspread, she would lie all day with her puppy beside her, reading fairy stories.

Spring came late, but when it came it was hand-in-hand with summer, and almost at once everything was baking and warm, and in the villages the people danced every night on concrete dancing floors under the plane trees...

I should love a dear little blind rat,’ said Wendy, and added in a contemplative voice: ‘I sometimes wish I were blind you know, so that I needn’t see my tooth water after I’ve spat it.

But I couldn't think it more hateful of them to have taken my fur tippet. Burglars never seem to realize one might feel the cold. How would they like it if I took away their wife's shawl?

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, from the hopes Aunt Sadie must have had for them, and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves. I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.

Behind us hung a Correggio St. Sebastian with the habitual Buchmanite expression on his face. "Awful tripe," said Uncle Matthew. "Fella wouldn't be grinning, he'd be dead with all those arrows in him.

... it is quite funny really when you think that probably I would have married him if he'd been at all clever about it. But instead of putting it to me as a sensible business proposition he would drag in all this talk about love the whole time, and I simply can't bear those showerings of sentimentality. Otherwise I should most likely have married him ages ago.

They spoke as though these Princes are so remote from life as we know it that the smallest sign of humanity, the mere fact even that they communicated by means of speech was worth noting and proclaiming.

Suddenly, just in time, I realised that he was a filthy Hun, so of course I turned my back on him and refused to shake hands. I think he noticed; anyway, I hope so. I hope he felt his position - General Murgatroyd

...indeed, with the Radletts, you never could tell. Why, for instance, would Victoria bellow like a bull and half kill Jassy whenever Jassy said, in a certain tone of voice, pointing her finger with a certain look, "Fancy?" I think they hardly knew why, themselves.

Isn't it lovely to be lovely me!

What can’t be cured must be endured.

A vida é por vezes triste e muitas vezes aborrecida mas de vez em quando há groselhas no bolo.

Talk about what you know and you won't get so angry

To make matters worse, Linda, it appears, is madly in love with a monster of a Scotsman, who came to dinner last night in his kilt. Those hairy old knees decided us. "The Mountains I can bear," said Loudie. "Natives in the semi-nude at dinner time is another matter. I leave tomorrow.

At this Linda gave up. Children might or might not enjoy air-raids actually in progress, but a child who was not thrilled by the idea of them was incomprehensible to her, and she could not imagine having conceived such a being. Useless to waste any more time and breath on this unnatural little girl.

Impotence and sodomy are socially O.K. but birth control is flagrantly middle-class.

What did I tell you, Fanny, about air-raids not killing people. Here we are, right as rain. My bed simply went through the floor, Plon-plon and I went on it, most comfortable.

These are the components of marriage, the wholemeal bread of life, rough, ordinary, but sustaining; Linda had been feeding upon honey-dew, and that is an incomparable diet

Oh darling, you know I don’t know how to take things out of ovens, one’s poor hands…. Besides, I do so hate getting up early.

WHY SHOULD SHE want to be married?” “It’s not as though she could be in love. She’s forty.

The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness.

Frenchwomen always give one to understand that arranging themselves is full-time work.

It only shows, said Aunt Sadie, that nothing really matters the least bit, so why make these fearful efforts to keep alive? Oh, but it's the efforts that one enjoys so much, said Davey...

the kentish week-enders on their way to church were appalled by the sight of four great hounds in full cry after two little girls. My uncle seemed to them like a wicked lord of fiction, and I became more than ever surrounded with an aura of madness, badness, and dangerousness for their children to know.

really enjoyed going out so long as it was not too often, she did not have to stay up too late, and she was allowed to look on peacefully without feeling obliged to make any conversational effort. Strangers bored and fatigued her. She only liked the company of those people with whom she had day-to-day interests in common,

Oh what a pity it happens to be Davey's day for getting drunk. I long to tell him, he will be so much interested.

Friendship is something to be built up carefully, by people with leisure, it is an art, nature does not enter into it.

The really important thing, if a marriage is to go well, without much love, is very very great niceness—gentillesse—and very good manners.

No woman really minds hearing of the past affairs of her lover, it is the future alone that has the power to terrify

Undeniable; Jennifer was one of those women whose meaning, if they have one, is only apparent to husband and children,

It is unfair' was a perpetual cry of the Radletts when young. The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life's essential unfairness.

All right, keep your hair on,' said the old singer, taking his off and adjusting a curl. 'Have another drink'.

I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.

more interesting than white mice—though I must frankly say, of all the mice I ever knew, Brenda was the most utterly dismal.” “She was dull,” I said, sycophantically. “When I go to London

(...) I was dreading the dinner because I knew that once I found myself in the dining-room seated (...), it would no longer be possible to remain a silent spectator, I should be obliged to try and think of things to say. It had been drummed into me all my life (...) that silence at meal times is anti-social. -'So long as you chatter, Fanny, it's of no consequence what you say (...)

Houses are entirely different when you know them well, she thought, and on first acquaintance even more different from their real selves, more deceptive about their real character than human beings.

Oh poor Octave, no luck at all, as usual," said Madame Rocher, "he is still with his regiment, still only a captain. Of course, if it hadn't been for this wretched war, he would be at least a colonel by now.

Air raid warning Yellow', she had experienced the unhealthy glow of excitement that she might easily become a air raid addict, or take to air raids in the same way that people do to drugs, and for much the same reason.

Sonia's terribly fond of juggling with people's lives. I never shall forget when she made me go to her doctor...I can only say he very nearly killed me. It's not her fault if I'm here today. She's entirely unscrupulous. She gets a hold over people much too easily, with her charm and her prestige, and then forces her own values on them.

-(...)I should like you to be on the verge of love but not yet quite in it. That's a very nice state of mind, while it lasts. -But of course, I had already dived over that verge and was swimming away in a blue sea of illusion towards, I supposed, the islands of the blest, but really towards domesticity, maternity and the usual lot of womankind.

Well, now you can see for yourself that she was delicate", said Davey triumphantly. "She's dead. It killed her. Doesn't that show you? I do wish I could make you Radletts understand that there is no such thing as imaginary illness. Nobody who is quite well could possibly be bothered to do all the things that I, for instance, am obliged to, in order to keep my wretched frame on its feet.

The people welcome a new da yas if they were certain of liking it, the shopkeepers pull up their blinds serene in the expectation of good trade, the workers go happily to their work, the people who have sat up all night in night clubs go happily to their rest, the orchestra of motor-car horns, of clanking trams, of whistling policemen tunes up for the daily symphony, and everywhere is joy.

She had all the sentimentality of her generation, and this sentimentality, growing like a green moss over her spirit, helped to conceal its texture of stone, if not from others, at any rate from herself. She was convinced that she was a woman of profound sensibility.

They flourished and shone with jewels, lovely clothes, brilliant hair and dazzling complexions; when they danced they really did seem to float, except when it was the Charleston, and that, though angular, was so accomplished that it made us gasp with admiration. Their conversation was quite evidently both daring and witty, one could see it ran like a river, splashing, dashing, and glittering in the sun. Linda was entranced by them, and decided then and there that she would become one of these brilliant beings and live in their world, even if it took her a lifetime to accomplish.

Time passed, and a morning came when Grace woke up at Yeotown feeling, if not quite happy, at least without a stifling blanket of unhappiness. This blanket had hitherto weighed upon her like something physical, so that there had been days when she had hardly been able to rise from under it and get out of bed.

Nancy: sisters are a shield against life's cruel adversity. Decca: sisters are life's cruel adversity. The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

Nonsense. And don’t you go marrying just anybody, for love,” she said. “Remember that love cannot last; it never, never does; but if you marry all this it’s for your life. One day, don’t forget, you’ll be middle-aged and think what that must be like for a woman who can’t have, say, a pair of diamond earrings. A woman of my age needs diamonds near her face, to give a sparkle.

Frederick William’s oddest whimsy was the collection of giants for his Potsdam Grenadiers. They were an obsession; he would spend any money, even risk going to war with his neighbours, to have tall men (often nearer seven than six feet in height, and generally idiotic) kidnapped, smuggled out of their native lands and brought to him. Finally, he acquired over two thousand of them. His agents were everywhere. Kirkman, an Irish giant, was kidnapped in the streets of London, an operation which cost £1,000. A tall Austrian diplomat was seized when getting into a cab in Hanover; he soon extricated himself from the situation, which remained a dinner-table topic for the rest of his life.

Madame de Pompadour never seems to have sold any of the objects which belonged to her. They accumulated in their thousands, and filled all her many houses to overflowing; after her death Marigny was obliged to take two big houses in Paris which, as well as the Elysée and the Réservoirs, contained her goods until the sale of them began. Furniture, china, statues, pictures, books, plants, jewels, linen, silver, carriages, horses, yards and hundreds of yards of stuff, trunks full of dresses, cellars full of wine; the inventory of all this, divided into nearly three thousand lots, very few lots containing less than a dozen objects, took two lawyers more than a year to make. Few human beings since the world began can have owned so many beautiful things.

A pair of young mothers now became the centre of interest. They had risen from their lying-in much sooner than the doctors would otherwise have allowed. (French doctors are always very good about recognizing the importance of social events, and certainly in this case had the patients been forbidden the ball the might easily have fretted themselves to death.) One came as the Duchesse de Berri with l’Enfant du Miracle, and the other as Madame de Montespan and the Duc du Maine. The two husbands, the ghost of the Duc de Berri, a dagger sticking out of his evening dress, and Louis XIV, were rather embarrassed really by the horrible screams of their so very young heirs, and hurried to the bar together. The noise was indeed terrific, and Albertine said crossly that had she been consulted she would, in this case, have permitted and even encouraged the substitution of dolls. The infants were then dumped down to cry themselves to sleep among the coats on her bed, whence they were presently collected by their mothers’ monthly nannies. Nobody thereafter could feel quite sure that the noble families of Bregendir and Belestat were not hopelessly and for ever interchanged. As their initials and coronets were, unfortunately, the same, and their baby linen came from the same shop, it was impossible to identify the children for certain. The mothers were sent for, but the pleasures of society rediscovered having greatly befogged their maternal instincts, they were obliged to admit they had no idea which was which. With a tremendous amount of guilty giggling they spun a coin for the prettier of the two babies and left it at that.

I hope you have sent your jewels to the bank,’ I said. ‘Oh, darling, don’t tease, you know how I haven’t got any now. But my money,’ she said with a self-conscious giggle, ‘is sewn into my stays. Fa rang up and begged me to, and I must say it did seem quite an idea. Oh, why aren’t you coming? I do feel so terrified – think of sleeping in the train, all alone.’ ‘Perhaps you won’t be alone,’ I said. ‘Foreigners are greatly given, I believe, to rape.’ ‘Yes, that would be nice, so long as they didn’t find my stays. Oh, we are off – good-bye darling, do think of me,’ she said, and, clenching her suède-covered fist, she shook it out of the window in a Communist salute.

They could not help loving anything that made them laugh. The Lisbon earthquake was “embarrassing to the physicists and humiliating to theologians” (Barbier). It robbed Voltaire of his optimism. In the huge waves which engulfed the town, in the chasms which opened underneath it, in volcanic flames which raged for days in the outskirts, some 50,000 people perished. But to the courtiers of Louis XV it was an enormous joke. M. de Baschi, Madame de Pompadour’s brother-in-law, was French Ambassador there at the time. He saw the Spanish Ambassador killed by the arms of Spain, which toppled onto his head from the portico of his embassy; Baschi then dashed into the house and rescued his colleague’s little boy whom he took, with his own family, to the country. When he got back to Versailles he kept the whole Court in roars of laughter for a week with his account of it all. “Have you heard Baschi on the earthquake?

Thelma Cazalet MP, unlike most of the other British 'honoured guests' attending [the 1938 Reichsparteitag], was strongly anti-Nazi and had accepted Ribbentrop's invitation only because she thought it important 'to be aware of what was going on.' As she entered the dining room of the Grand Hotel on the first night, she immediately caught sight of Unity Mitford seated at the long 'British' table with her parents Lord and Lady Redesdale. 'Unity is alarmingly pretty,' she wrote in her diary, 'but I have never seen anyone so pretty with absolutely no charm in her face and a rather stupid expression.

In a televised version of one of Nancy’s books, these child hunts were given a more sinister connotation with the children running terrified through woods while their father, on horseback, thundered after them with a pack of hounds baying. In fact the children loved it – they thought the hound was ‘so clever’.29 In her novel Nancy had referred to ‘four great hounds in full cry after two little girls’ and ‘Uncle Matthew and the rest would follow on horseback’.30 As a result, fiction overlaid fact, and during research for this book I met people who believed, and read articles that stated, that the Mitfords led the lives of the fictional Radletts, and at least one American journalist was convinced that David had ‘hunted’ his poor abused children with dogs. There was never any pressure to conform and the children grew as they wanted. There were no half-measures in their behaviour. ‘We either laughed so uproariously that it drove the grown-ups mad, or else it was a frightful row which ended in one of us bouncing out of the room in floods of tears, banging the door as loud as possible.