Cluny Brown Quotes

“We pray, give us this day our daily bread—not our daily caneton à la presse. Luxury should be the détente after work, the riot after abstinence, one should not become used to it.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“If you had a smattering of education you would realize that perfection of form can give validity to any sentiment, however preposterous.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“All she knew consciously of love were its preliminaries as taught by the movies, and these she and Belinski had skipped: they had met at the centre of the maze, not on its outer rim: they accepted each other simply and finally as the basic fact of their joint lives.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“They looked at each other earnestly. Beneath the surface constraint a deep current of ease and understanding had begun to flow between them, a sense of naturalness as strong as sweet. For a moment they gave themselves up to it without question.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“It's very interesting. You see, I'm not intellectual, I can't cut bits out of newspapers, but I am interested in people. And when they're being in love, you do get to know them.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“Tell Aunt Addie I am sick and tired of sending love when she never sends so much as a post card back.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“I have so often thought how in all English art the place of women is taken by landscape. Your poetry is full of it, you are a nation of landscape painters. In other countries a man spends his fortune on a mistress; here you marry a fortune to save your estates. En revanche, the ladies have their flower-gardens. You yourself have travelled abroad, you take an interest in politics and so on, you feel yourself one of the new restless generation; but you are fighting against the landscape all the time.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“Here Andrew did his father an injustice: simple, willing and conscientious, Sir Henry would have made a happy carpenter; but it was quite true that he had gone through life without ever realizing the narrowness of his pleasant path.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“He was suffering from a moral appendicitis.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“When the heir is absent, the great house drowses: such is the law, for great houses and the heirs to them, all the world over.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“Blest, who can unconcernedly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“In one sense London, Paddington, was of course her home; she had lived there for eighteen years, and on the whole had been quite happy; it was her home as much as anywhere. But it wasn't her home inevitably; it hadn't the power that draws a grown person back to the scene of even an unhappy childhood. It made no claim on her.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown

“So the letters took a long time to get there, and the replies even longer to get back, and all the news was out of date; and this gave his correspondence a peculiar timeless quality which was very soothing.”
― Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown