Growing Up Quotes

“Well, I'll try to explain," said Mrs Morland, pushing all her hairpins well into her head by the simple expedient of banging her hat with both hands. "You see, my publisher will make me write books."
She paused dramatically.
George said to his friend it did seem a shame, a lady like her.
"So then," pursued Mrs Morland, looking earnestly into space, "I get so furious that I simply don't know what to do. So I buy some exercise books, which are a perfectly frightful price now, at least the cost the same but there are hardly any pages so it comes to much the same thing in the end, and some more pencils. And what is perfectly maddening is that the pencils called B are so soft that you use them up at once besides the lead breaking every time you sharpen them, and the ones called H don't mark at all. And then I sit down very angrily, and write a book."
She then realised with horror that though she had come to the end of her subject there were still thirty minutes of her allotted time to be filled.
"I think it's a shame, Miss," said George.
"I don't do it on purpose," said Mrs Morland, pleading her cause as well as she could. "You see, when my husband died I wasn't very well off and I had four boys, so I simply had to do something. I didn't ever mean to write books."
George's friend, going very red in the face, brought out an ill-prepared sentence to the effect that the late Mr Morland's death had been on the whole a gain to humanity.
"Thank you very much," said Mrs Morland gratefully."I do
so understand what you mean, and it is so kind of you, and I must say I get on very well as I am, and don't feel a bit like a widow."
George said his Dad died before he was born, so he didn't seem to miss him like.
"No," said Mrs Morland, after considering this statement, "you couldn't. Not unless your mother put it into your head."
"Mum died when I was a month old," said George with some pride, "and auntie she brought me up."
"I am sorry," said Mrs Morland.”
― Angela Thirkell, Growing Up

“It is true that christian-naming is so common as almost to have done away with the use of surnames, especially we regret to say, among men, but among the older generation the formality of title is less easily set aside, as Lydia with unusual perception had noted in the case of Lady Waring. In ordering Philip and Leslie to drop the prefix she had but done what anyone would do to contemporaries, probably thinking, if she did think about it, that she had eased their path. And indeed she would have eased it, or they would quite possibly have dropped into first names by themselves before long, had not each been touched in the heart by the other. To say Philip or Leslie offhand was to each, though they were not consciously aware of it, a faint impropriety, a pulling open of rose-petals which might hurt the rose, a digging up of the plant to see how it was growing.”
― Angela Thirkell, Growing Up

“Philip said that the older he got the more he realised that everyone in Dickens, without exception, was a real person, and quite a lot of them were among his friends.”
― Angela Thirkell, Growing Up

“Nice," said Mrs Spender emphatically, "is hardly the word, if you see what I mean. I mean a man who does such wonderful good by his mere influence, though mind you I don't mean like an Indian by simply sitting and thinking of nothing.”
― Angela Thirkell , Growing Up

“At first the baby was so transported with wrath, that it shrieked more loudly than before, but after a while nature asserted itself against imbecility and with one great heave and spasm of fury it suddenly became like the jelly smoother than the creamy curd, its vengeful limbs relaxed, and with long shuddering breaths it began to suck its bottle, both hands clutching the beloved object and an angry suspicious eye roving the nursery against the possible approach of milk-thieves.”
― Angela Thirkell, Growing Up

“This led her to a consideration of how very difficult it must be for people to write novels, because all the young heroines were in the Forces or civilian jobs, and all the young heroes the same, so that there was very little time for novelists to make them fall in love with each other, unless they made the hero be a flying officer and the heroine a Waaf, and then one would have to know all the details of the R.A.F or one would make the most dreadful howlers.”
― Angela Thirkell, Growing Up