The Camomile Quotes

“I knew then where my place was. I knew - though I hate and fear failure - that I would rather end like Don John than succeed on the lines that marriage with Duncan would inevitably lay down for me.”
― Catherine Carswell, The Camomile

“One thing in the book that does certainly help to reconcile me to what Mrs. Lockhart calls 'our walk of life' is the wonderfully poor stuff that seems to pass for choice wit among the peerage.”
― Catherine Carswell, The Camomile

“...how can I describe Endrick Street to anyone who has never been in it? 'Ugly' is not the word that describes it. it is just one of those desperate streets which we have here and there in Glasgow and, so far as I have seen, you have not at all in London. It is long and black and melancholy as a stone chasm. All hope abandons you as you enter it. From morning till night there is the sound of worn carpets being beaten, and of stone steps being scrubbed by landladies in Hinde's curlers. The great windows are always left dirty, the broken black railings are never repaired, and there is a smell of soot as if a chimney had just been on fire. Nothing seems to thrive in the back greens but soot and cats. I have never once walked down it but there has been a half empty coal-cart on the roadway with a man standing up in it his hand to his mouth, wailing the words 'Coal briquettes!”
― Catherine Carswell, The Camomile

“Now I am sitting in the Botanic Gardens. Though the puddles are frozen in the shade, you could sit out for ever so long in the sun without feeling cold. No one there but children with their nurses, and old men with pale, dreamy eyes thinking of nothing, perhaps wondering vaguely if they will hold on to see another spring. I am on a bench overlooking the Kelvin, and have been watching the seagulls. Whole flocks have come up inland from the Clyde. There are rooks too, very noisy and restless, deceived perhaps by the sunshine into thinking the winter is over.”
― Catherine Carswell, The Camomile

“Don't you agree that there must be something radically wrong with a civilisation, society, theory of life - call it what you like in which a hard-working, serious young woman like myself cannot obtain, without enormous difficulty, expense, or infliction of pain on others, a quiet, clean, pleasant room in which she can work, dream her dreams, write out her thoughts, and keep her few treasures in peace.”
― Catherine Carswell, The Camomile