At Mrs Lippincote's Quotes

“OLIVER DAVENANT did not merely read books. He snuffed them up, took breaths of them into his lungs, filled his eyes with the sight of the print and his head with the sound of words. Some emanation from the book itself poured into his bones, as if he were absorbing steady sunshine. The pages had personality. He was of the kind who cannot have a horrifying book in the room at night. He would, in fine weather, lay it upon an outside sill and close the window. Often Julia would see a book lying on his doormat.

As well as this, his reading led him in and out of love. At first, it was the picture of Alice going up on tiptoe to shake hands with Humpty Dumpty; then the little Fatima in his Arthur Rackham book, her sweet dusky face, the coins hanging on her brow, the billowing trousers and embroidered coat. Her childish face was alive with excitement as she put the key to the lock. “Don’t!” he had once cried to her in loud agony.

In London, he would go every Saturday morning to the Public Library to look at a picture of Lorna Doone. Some Saturdays it was not there, and he would go home again, wondering who had borrowed her, in what kind of house she found herself that week-end. On his last Saturday, he went to say good-bye and the book was not there, so he sat down at a table to await its return. Just before the library was to be shut for lunch-time, he went to the shelf and kissed the two books which would lie on either side of his Lorna when she was returned and, having left this message of farewell, made his way home, late for lunch and empty of heart.

If this passion is to be called reading, then the matrons with their circulating libraries and the clergymen with their detective tales are merely flirting and passing time. To discover how Oliver’s life was lived, it was necessary, as in reading The Waste Land, to have an extensive knowledge of literature. With impartiality, he studied comic papers and encyclopaedia, Eleanor’s pamphlets on whatever interested her at the moment, the labels on breakfast cereals and cod liver oil, Conan Doyle and Charlotte Brontë.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's

“Oliver Davenant did not merely read books. He snuffed them up, took breaths of them into his lungs, filled his eyes with the sight of the print and his head with the sound of words.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's

“Men are not forced to turn their desolation to advantage as women are. It’s easier for them to dissipate their passion, quell their restlessness in other ways.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's

“Would you like a cup of tea?” asked Julia, who had enough breeding to know that at all emergencies—birth, death or defeat—cups of tea must at once be offered.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's

“I don’t see why” said the Wing Commander. “The very best of families have mad daughters. It never diminishes their importance. Rather increases it.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's

“One of them was the usual Irishman who stands by the bar of every pub selling talk for beer, one of the oldest professions.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's

“She exasperated him. Society necessarily has a great many little rules, especially relating to the behaviour of women. One accepted them, and life ran smoothly and without embarrassment, or as far as that is possible where there are two sexes. Without the little rules, everything became queer and unsafe. When he had married Julia, he had thought her woefully ignorant of the world; had looked forward, indeed, to assisting in her development. But she had been grown up all the time; or, at least, she had not changed. The root of the trouble was not ignorance at all, but the refusal to accept. ‘If only she would!’ he thought now, staring at her; ‘If only she would accept’ The room was between them. She stood there smiling, blinking still in the bright light. He was still fanning the air peevishly with his hand.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's

“Anyhow,” he said, seeing her poor face, “people mostly die in nursing homes these days.” That was Roddy all over—that leader of men, who did not know how the world lived, discounting all those who do not go to nursing homes, and Mrs Lippincote herself who believed in dying, if possible, upon the bed where one was born, and who had herself closed (without horror, only grief) the eyes of her dead husband in this very room a month or two before.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's

“In the mirror,' she thought, 'he sees something unreal - he sees the opinion of the world, is driven by fear of the world and judges me by the world's standards. But the world isn't real. It has no existence. Mr. Taylor is real - or was until this morning - and I am real, but what is Roddy? He is just a man looking into a mirror watching his own face growing angrier.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's

“They are the hands he started out with,’ she suddenly thought. ‘Like all of us. Our faces, our bodies change, our manners, our hearts, but not our hands,”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's

“It embarrasses him when I try to overhear conversations in restaurants, or sit and stare with my mouth open in the train, and what good does it do, since other people’s lives remain an illusion? You may catch at their clothes and are sometimes left with shreds of them in your hands, but the people themselves are gone and then what little treasure and brightness you may bring home to yourself… changes at once to darkness, is absorbed by your own shadow.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's

“At first, it was like being young all over again. I thought I had so little time left I must do something great. But you don’t. You do nothing. You go on exactly as if you did not know, and all the time you are waiting for the grave, just as one always is whether one knows how long or not. When the time comes, of course, I’ll be sorry, regret this, that and the other, wish I had done many more things, but that’s how death must come to everyone. Only for the very few and the very old can it be any different.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's

“Yes, I'm his mother. We come in at the beginning and the end. The rest of the time they're too grand for us.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's

“It embarrasses him when I try to overhear conversations in restaurants, or sit and stare with my mouth open in the train, and what good does it do, since other people’s lives remain an illusion? You may catch at their clothes and are sometimes left with shreds of them in your hands, but the people themselves are gone and then when little treasure and brightness you may bring home to yourself… changes at once to darkness, is absorbed by your own shadow.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's

“Poor Mr Lippincote could not help dying. Death does not always give us a chance of tidying up. (118)”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's

“We can all remember saying something inadequate in a crisis or even, the more unbalanced of us, giggling at the news of death.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's

“Lucky for us Emily was not a man,” said Julia, “or she might have drunk herself to death at the Black Bull. It was better to write Wuthering Heights, but she really had no choice.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's

“She tipped her cup over the saucer and then looked at the tea leaves. “It’s a fine thing for a Marxist to say,” she added, “but I do see signs of happiness here.” She cheated, though, moving one tea leaf alongside another to improve the omens.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's