Begin Again Quotes

“Mrs. Fisher sighed. The prickliness, the defiance, the silly, silly pride! Trying, but at the same time faintly touching. The pathetic confidence that any escape from present circumstances spelled freedom. The yet unshattered illusion that things could ever be as you wanted them in this world.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“She wants a change, you see,” said Mrs. Fisher, half apologetically. She was thinking how pleasant it would be if Leslie had a companion like this nice boy to keep her happy at home. “Oh, well,” said Bill, with an effort at tolerance, “I suppose there’s something in that. I suppose really every one wants what they haven’t got.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“It’s not that I don’t like the Lovelaces,” said Mrs. Perry, apologetically emerging from behind her tree as the clear merry voices inquiring about the whereabouts of beauty-spots and thermos flasks mercifully died away into another part of the woods, “but I just felt I couldn’t meet them—you don’t want any one but the family when—” Nobody except Claud noticed his adoption.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“Oh, mummy, I want to be independent.” Mrs. Fisher sighed. Children on whom one gladly lavished time and money with no motive at heart but their happiness; children who, imagining fetters where none existed, broke away exulting, drunk with the illusion of escape.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“Well, mummy, when you care about a thing, you know —I mean really care. . . . Besides Florence and Jane take their work in their stride. I mean I’d never describe them as being sort of chained to their work at all. Their real life—I mean their real life,” said Leslie with meaning, “goes on all the time beside it.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“Poor Henry,” she said gayly, “it must be awful to take things so hard.” “It is rather poor Henry, I think,” croaked Florence unexpectedly, wondering if, supposing she had such a devoted lover, she would fling his letters quite so airily into the waste-paper basket.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“Well, I think,” said Henrietta, firmly closing the lid of her suit-case, “that if you want to keep on any sort of terms with your family, you have to tell lies.” “I think you’re wrong, you know,” said Sylvia, who, regarding the question from an academic point of view, had conveniently forgotten the lies she had occasionally been obliged to tell. (She had moreover become an adept at avoiding lying by quite simply not proffering any information.)”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“Do you know, by the way, whether your sister shares in your very odd convictions as to the unimportance of money?” “Henrietta? Oh, I shouldn’t think so. She’s hardly reached the stage of really thinking things out for herself yet, you know. She’s awfully young in mind still.” “Let us hope that she will remain mentally arrested then. Good night, my dear.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“Every generation,” he continued more gently, “has a different point of view. You mustn’t think I don’t appreciate that. Why do you always think we can’t understand? Perhaps we don’t always agree. But at least we can understand that you want to think out things for yourself.” He felt her softening and added unwisely, “Although, believe me, my dear, when you’re a bit older you’ll find that we aren’t so wrong after all.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“There was no doubt that the idealism of youth could be extraordinarily irritating.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“In that case I should think you’d be glad of the money—for convenience’s sake,” suggested Mr. Perry. It seemed to him madness that his daughter should stand on the lawn and calmly contemplate a course of conduct for which marriage would be merely, in the last extremity, a “convenience.” However, there was apparently no immediate cause for alarm, and Heaven defend him from provoking his daughter to give him a fuller exposition of her views on marriage—he had, from time to time, heard enough of the “new morality” to be anxious to avoid at all costs further elucidation of this immoral rubbish.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“My dear Sylvia! Why on earth this extraordinary idea! Tell me, my dear”—an illuminating idea occurred to him—“have you fallen in love with some one—some one not of your own class? Some one socially impossible? You needn’t be afraid to tell me, you know.” He glanced wildly round for inspiration. “The gardener, for instance?”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“A house, a garden, children—these are the things a man works for, he thought, these are the things that remain. He heard a footstep, and, turning, saw his daughter coming across the lawn towards him.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“That will be quite possible, dear, I think. What about you two? That’s very nice, then. Did you accept, Charles?” “Yes. No, I said you’d phone when I got back,” said Mr. Perry, reproducing, without intending to, the sequence of his replies. He had been carefully trained by his family never to accept invitations without leaving a possible loop-hole, but he usually remembered this after he had already accepted.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“I only wish I was chained to it. Some days I do nothing but run up and down stairs all day chasing flies. Honestly, Jane, it is a bit silly. I should be much happier—and incidentally much better—at my job if I’d left school at sixteen and done a secretarial training straight away and never gone to Oxford or anything.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“And his wife’s a great friend of mother’s,” said Sylvia, becoming more and more horrifyingly conventional. Forgotten were her declarations of a profound belief in married independence, her assertions that any man had a right to a complete and fulfilled existence. Or not perhaps quite forgotten, and not exactly disproved. It was merely quite clear that the present situation had nothing to do with this eminently reasonable theory of living. “Sylvia, my sweet, please don’t worry. You’re being so funny about this. I should never have expected you to mind so much. You’re leaping to conclusions in the most violent way. You don’t want me to offer to horsewhip the cad, do you?”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“It was rather awful to think he really would refuse to get another. They had often agreed together that no one should ever be responsible for any one else. On the other hand it was comforting to be looked after (although she would not admit this to Claud).”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“They were often very silly together. Sylvia sometimes reflected that it was odd that two intelligent adults should find pleasure in absurd nicknames, holding hands, private jokes and pulling each other’s hair. She apologized to herself by saying that if she realized she was being silly she wasn’t being quite so silly after all.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“I don’t think my love for you will ever change.” “Oh, darling! I wish you wouldn’t talk about ‘my love for you’ as though it were a sort of overcoat, guaranteed not to wear out.” “You only talk like that because it’s fashionable to pretend not to be serious about anything.” “Is it fashionable? I suppose the newspapers say so. I didn’t know.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“No. But it would have been much more amusing if it had. School was so ghastly dull.” “Amusing!” cried Florence scornfully, “amusing! Good God, I’m not trying to be amusing. I want to paint an absolutely sincere picture of school life.” “Oh, of course, from that point of view, I think it’s terribly good,” said Jane hastily.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“she found herself wondering where Henrietta spent all her time. “Mary and people.” The vague explanation was typical. Who were these people she had been so constantly with of late? When I was eighteen, thought Sylvia with uncharacteristic severity, and had just left school, mummy knew a lot more about my doings than she does about Henrietta’s. Casting her mind back it seemed to her that she was much younger for her age at eighteen than Henrietta. She remembered dimly awkwardness at dances, hesitation over clothes, shyness—Sylvia smiled at the incongruity of associating such things with Henrietta.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“She could not remember that she had ever been like that as a young girl herself. But Sylvia, it appeared, believed that if you didn’t think things out for yourself (and the conclusions to these thoughts were inevitably in direct opposition to what Mrs. Perry called ordinary decency and Sylvia alluded to as middle-class morality) then you were an unfulfilled person, and consequently an unhappy one. “Well, anyway, I’m not unhappy,” said Mrs. Perry, emphatically.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“In practice it most definitely was not, not, at least, if you had spent three years at Oxford, three years which might be regarded as either intellectualizing or unsettling—the latter effect had been most apparent during the few months Florence had spent at home before coming to London to share the flat with Jane. Oxford, it appeared, if it did not seem to have fitted her for any precise occupation, had at least unfitted her for a great many things. Impossible to stay at home.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“Sorry,” said Henry flatly. It was no good. He could never make Jane really care. He could never make her suffer a tenth of what he himself suffered whenever they quarrelled. She was so dear to him, so painfully dear. And so sweet to him too, except when they quarrelled, and said bitter things to each other; and even then there was no malice in what she said, none of the pent-up resentment that drove him to wound himself savagely in saying cruel things to her. “It’s just that I’m not your type really, Henry,” Jane had said yesterday, calmly, pleasantly even, in the tone she might have said it was raining or asked for the marmalade.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“Alarm clocks and frying pans and divan beds were not, to Jane and Florence, romantic symbols of escape and independence. They were simply things which you had to have in a flat. Necessary, of course, but a nuisance. According to their kind they needed perpetual winding, cleaning, or remaking.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“I don’t believe there’s the slightest idea of an engagement between them,” she said, “and I think it’s rather hard on Sylvia if her mother goes about talking like that. As a matter of fact, Sylvia was saying to me the other day that she didn’t think she’d ever want to marry. She doesn’t really believe in it.” “Oh, I see,” said Mrs. Fisher, instantly deciding that Sylvia’s love-affair must have suffered some slight setback. Probably this also accounted for her ill humour the other day.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again

“Oxford, it appeared, if it did not seem to have fitted her for any precise occupation, had at least unfitted her for a great many things.”
― Ursula Orange, Begin Again