Miss Bunting Quotes

“Any relation of the Allington Dales?” said Lord Pomfret. “That old Miss Lily Dale was his great-aunt or something of the sort,” said Admiral Palliser; but Lord Pomfret had never heard of her. “She was engaged to some man, then broke it off,” said the Admiral, “and I gather she lived on the romance till she was well over eighty. A real Victorian heroine.”
― Angela Thirkell, Miss Bunting

“If it comes to that, we are getting to a pretty good age ourselves,” said the Dean. “I wonder that the people who try to write the Bible in modern language don’t alter the threescore years and ten.” Mr. Birkett said that judging from the bits of Basic English he had seen, there would certainly be no word for threescore and probably not for ten. “One and one and one would be the best they could do.”“Come, Birkett, be fair,” said the Dean. “Even the Romans knew no better than to say ten-fifty when they meant forty. Or if they didn’t say it, they wrote it and carved it, which looks as if they meant it.”“And those dreadful French say four-twenty-thirteen for ninety-three,” said Mr. Birkett. “And look at the Germans, saying half-eight when they mean half-past seven,” responded the Dean. “Or those foul Italians thinking that quattrocento means the fifteenth century,” said Mr. Birkett in antistrophe”
― Angela Thirkell, Miss Bunting

“Much as he loved his many daughters and his two sons, now all married, all with children, he sometimes, and especially at Christmas and during school holidays when his wife’s exuberant grandmotherhood filled the Deanery with children and nurses and odd parents, echoed from his heart the cry, “Oh, for an hour of Herod.”
― Angela Thirkell, Miss Bunting

“He was a gentleman of considerable property in the Woolram Valley and believed that anything he dug up was a Roman remain. He was succeeded in the presidency by Sir Walpole Pridham, whose descendant Sir Edmund Pridham is still a hard-working servant of the county. Sir Walpole believed with fervour equal to Mr. Horatio Palmer’s that whatever he dug up was British, and since then the presidentship had been divided pretty evenly between the Roman and the British enthusiasts, and had gradually become the blue ribbon of Barsetshire, having been held by the Duke of Omnium, an Earl de Courcy, an Earl of Pomfret, Dean Arabin, Mr. Frank Gresham (little Frank’s great-grandfather who married a fortune), and in fact by all the county’s most noted peers, landed proprietors and spiritual leaders.”
― Angela Thirkell, Miss Bunting

“It appeared, not to put too fine a point upon it, that to Mr. Adams’s mind Mrs. Merivale and her daughters were not quite good enough for his daughter. The terrifying and to her almost unexplored hierarchy of the great mass of English people rose before her with all its gins and snares. Belonging as she did to a level upon which the Duke of Omnium at one end and, say, Robin Dale, the crippled schoolmaster, at the other, were in essentials equal, being, though a duke was always a duke, gentlemen, she had never really troubled to conceive the gradations, far greater than those between peer and private gentleman, which seamed and rent the sub-middle classes.”
― Angela Thirkell, Miss Bunting

“But miracles are not expected and mostly do not happen. Mr. Adams did not turn into a Belton, nor did his daughter. The aboriginal Hogglestock was deep in them; they conceived a slightly suspicious attitude to unknown people, ready to heave half-bricks; but they had also seen and admired another world, and could feel fairly at ease in it when sure that its intentions were good.”
― Angela Thirkell, Miss Bunting