Great Granny Webster Quotes

“Aunt Lavinia always had a near-religious belief that it was wicked to inflict one's personal despair on others. Any display of self-pity or self-dissatisfaction she saw as a social cruelty that was very nearly criminal.”
― Caroline Blackwood, Great Granny Webster

“There is really nothing more unattractive than the sight of a young woman displaying a repulsive amount of arm.”
― Caroline Blackwood, Great Granny Webster

“As you get older no doubt you'll change automatically, just like I did. You will learn all the tricks. You will dress much better, and talk much more, and listen much less. And you'll start to realise that it never does one much good to take anything too seriously at all.”
― Caroline Blackwood, Great Granny Webster

“She took one of her poodle's charcoal biscuits out of the packet and ate it herself. 'Either these are quite delicious or quite disgusting. Like many things in life, it's rather hard to tell which,' she said.”
― Caroline Blackwood, Great Granny Webster

“Great Granny Webster seemed to hate colours. Almost everything she owned was either black or dark brown.”
― Caroline Blackwood, Great Granny Webster

“I suddenly saw Great Granny Webster as awesome. She had outlived so many. She had managed to be both the start of a line and the end of a line. In my family she seemed to be Alpha and Omega.”
― Caroline Blackwood, Great Granny Webster

“But Aunt Lavinia had finally succeeded in killing herself six months before, dying in her Mayfair house from an overdose of vodka and sleeping pills. She had slipped out of life in much the same eel-like way that she had slipped out of her many marriages and romances.”
― Caroline Blackwood, Great Granny Webster

“It was the mood of that pre-war Oxford which remained lost for me—the high spirits, hope and recklessness, the sense of comradeship made closer through shared jokes and rebellion. This mood was too fragile to be resurrected many years after it had suffered a smoke-like dispersal.”
― Caroline Blackwood, Great Granny Webster

“At the beginning I had been delighted to hear that I was considered an invalid and that I was going to be sent to stay with her for two months. When I told my Aunt Lavinia she said, “I’ll cross my fingers for you, darling,” and I had no idea what she meant. At that time I was convinced that there was nothing worse in life than being at my boarding-school; but from the first moment I walked through Great Granny Webster’s huge forbidding black front door, which had a hideous stained-glass covered porch full of potted plants that had to be watered day and night by Richards, I was starting to revise this opinion.”
― Caroline Blackwood, Great Granny Webster

“When one was with her she could almost persuade one that there was something cowardly and despicable in any emotional dodging, in any refusal to experience every single blow that life could deal one, head-on. She could make one feel that there was an almost super-human courage in the way she was not frightened to admit that the only thing she now hoped for from life was a continued consciousness, unpleasant as she well knew that it had to be. All she wanted from each new day that broke was the knowledge that she was still defiantly there - that against all odds she had still managed to survive in the lonely, loveless vacuum she had created for herself.”
― Caroline Blackwood, Great Granny Webster

“I had hardly ever seen Great Granny Webster at that time, and yet her feelings interested me. She was little more to me than the silhouette of a formidable old woman dressed in black who appeared occasionally at family gatherings and made us feel that she was taking a dangerous risk with her upright spine when circumstances forced her to bend over and kiss her great-grandchildren.”
― Caroline Blackwood, Great Granny Webster