The Headmistress Quotes

“Good,’ said Mr Carton. ‘Why children, a loathsome breed who should be kept under hatches or in monasteries till they have acquired some rudiments of manners and consideration for others, should be encouraged to think themselves of importance now, I do not know. The English as a race have always been sentimental about dogs, and draught horses in Italy where most of them have never been, but this wave of sentiment about children is a new and revolting outburst.”
― Angela Thirkell, The Headmistress

“In fact I have, selfishly, only one regret at your having left the Park – the library.’ ‘It’s locked and I’ve got the key,’ said Mr Belton. ‘I’ve got a duplicate. You can have it. No one else wants to go in. I don’t believe any of the children can read at all.”
― Angela Thirkell, The Headmistress

“Captain Hornby thought this a very sensible idea. He knew, and Elsa knew, that the unspoken thought underlying her suggestion was, “If you are killed your lawyers will know what is here”; a thought which, spoken and unspoken, must underlie most people’s arrangements now.”
― Angela Thirkell, The Headmistress

“Your great-uncle the bishop, Oriel, married some time in the ’sixties one of Squire Gresham’s daughters whose name for the moment escapes me. His wife’s brother, Frank Gresham, the present man’s great-grandfather, married Mary Thorne who was the illegitimate niece of the Dr. Thorne who married Miss Dunstable whose money came from a patent Ointment of Lebanon. Dr. Thorne was only a distant cousin of the Ullathorne Thornes, to whom old Lady Pomfret belonged, but the connection is there all right, though I couldn’t give the precise degree.”
― Angela Thirkell, The Headmistress

“She then swung out towards the middle of the lake. It has long been obvious to the meanest of our readers – we allude to the one who asked the young lady at the libery for a nice book and now wishes she had got something different, something really nice if you know what I mean – that an author does not invent a lake with a spring under it and bring a band of hooligans out from Barchester at great waste of the country’s petrol to try to crack the ice without intending to make someone fall in.”
― Angela Thirkell, The Headmistress

“To Mrs Belton’s relief the lights in the hall were now put out and the curtains drawn apart. As all amateur theatricals are exclusively for the benefit of the actors with no reference to the wishes or tastes of the audience, we will not attempt to describe these in any detail.”
― Angela Thirkell, The Headmistress

“Besides,’ he added, ‘Catriona Ellangowan is a charming woman. I nearly married her myself once, but she very rightly turned me down for Ellangowan who is a first-rate fellow.’ Mrs Belton was a little anxious over this difference of opinion and slightly ashamed of her daughter’s incivility, though she knew it sprang largely from the nervous state that an engagement can put the most level-headed young woman into, but she could not help being secretly amused by Elsa’s unconcealed surprise and mortification that Captain Hornby, who was considerably her senior and had been about a great deal, should have so far forgotten himself as to prefer any woman to her before he had met her.”
― Angela Thirkell, The Headmistress

“It says there’s no marriages in heaven, Mrs Powlett,’ said Dorothy, giving a final polish to the pudding spoons with a piece of washleather. ‘I’m ashamed of you, Dorothy,’ said Mrs Powlett, ‘speaking of the Bible as “it”. And don’t tell me it’s in the Bible, Dorothy, for that is a book we were never meant to understand. Now come along and give me a hand and don’t leave the shammy on the Vicar’s chair.”
― Angela Thirkell, The Headmistress

“I never did take sugar in my tea, or in coffee,’ said the Vicar. ‘I have always disliked it. But I understood that by taking saccharine, we were somehow assisting the war effort.”
― Angela Thirkell, The Headmistress