Margery Sharp > Quotes

“If he's a poet, why's he in jail?" demanded a suspicious voice.
Madam Chairwoman shrugged velvet shoulders.
"Perhaps he writes free verse," she suggested cunningly.
A stir of approval answered her. Mice are all for people being free, so that they too can be freed form their eternal task of cheering prisoners--so that they can stay snug at home, nibbling the family cheese, instead of sleeping out in damp straw on a diet of stale bread.”
― Margery Sharp, The Rescuers

“Meself I like a breath of air before I go to bed, same as I like a bite o' cheese or something before I take me teeth out.”
― Margery Sharp, The Flowering Thorn

“We pray, give us this day our daily bread—not our daily caneton à la presse. Luxury should be the détente after work, the riot after abstinence, one should not become used to it.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“Life wasn’t a shadow. It was a beautiful, warm, many-voiced reality, full of omnibuses and orchestras and the smell of earth after rain.”
― Margery Sharp, Rhododendron Pie

“If you had a smattering of education you would realize that perfection of form can give validity to any sentiment, however preposterous.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“Here Andrew did his father an injustice: simple, willing and conscientious, Sir Henry would have made a happy carpenter; but it was quite true that he had gone through life without ever realizing the narrowness of his pleasant path.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“Her last glimpse of them was as they stood waving vigorously -- Mr. Meare to the left, his wife to the right; it had to be thus, because they were also hand-in-hand.”
― Margery Sharp, Something Light

“All she knew consciously of love were its preliminaries as taught by the movies, and these she and Belinski had skipped: they had met at the centre of the maze, not on its outer rim: they accepted each other simply and finally as the basic fact of their joint lives.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“They looked at each other earnestly. Beneath the surface constraint a deep current of ease and understanding had begun to flow between them, a sense of naturalness as strong as sweet. For a moment they gave themselves up to it without question.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“I absolutely believe it is fatal to write ever below your best, even if what you write may never be published.”
― Margery Sharp

“I have so often thought how in all English art the place of women is taken by landscape. Your poetry is full of it, you are a nation of landscape painters. In other countries a man spends his fortune on a mistress; here you marry a fortune to save your estates. En revanche, the ladies have their flower-gardens. You yourself have travelled abroad, you take an interest in politics and so on, you feel yourself one of the new restless generation; but you are fighting against the landscape all the time.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“It's very interesting. You see, I'm not intellectual, I can't cut bits out of newspapers, but I am interested in people. And when they're being in love, you do get to know them.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“So the letters took a long time to get there, and the replies even longer to get back, and all the news was out of date; and this gave his correspondence a peculiar timeless quality which was very soothing.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“What you must have seen, marveled bernard, of courts and embassies! I'm afraid my society must seem very dull to you.
Not at all, said miss Bianca. There is nothing more tedious than a constant round of gaiety. What you have to tell, of life in a pantry, is far more interesting.
They talked in this way for hours, miss Bianca describing things like musical evenings when the embassy ballroom was decorated with six hundred pink roses, and Bernard describing things like sports Day in the pantry. (The biggest race twice round the top china shelf, five points penalty if you touched china.) They told each other their earliest recollections: miss Bianca's of waking up on a pink silk pillow, and Bernard's of helping to roll home a walnut . . .
It was a happy time. By night songs and stories, by day agreeable conversation, and ever the beautiful landscape unfolding on either hand -- it was a happy time indeed. If only it could have gone on forever! But the days passed, the wagons rolled, and presently the country began to change.”
― Margery Sharp, The Rescuers

“Tell Aunt Addie I am sick and tired of sending love when she never sends so much as a post card back.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“When the heir is absent, the great house drowses: such is the law, for great houses and the heirs to them, all the world over.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“In one sense London, Paddington, was of course her home; she had lived there for eighteen years, and on the whole had been quite happy; it was her home as much as anywhere. But it wasn't her home inevitably; it hadn't the power that draws a grown person back to the scene of even an unhappy childhood. It made no claim on her.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“Blest, who can unconcernedly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“He was suffering from a moral appendicitis.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“My darling, why didn't you say so before? You know, I sometimes wonder," she added, turning to Ann, "what it would be like to have no children."
"Jolly dull, " said John. "you'd be bored stiff. What would you do all day?"
"Well I could read a little," said Mrs Gayford, rather vaguely, "really good books, you know, and the Times Literary Supplement. I used to be very fond of it.”
― Margery Sharp, Rhododendron Pie