The Long View Quotes

“It was foolish to indulge in elaborate preconceptions: anticipation was a featherweight, doomed to compete with the inevitable, convincing bulk of reality. The trouble was that one had to face reality without knowing beforehand precisely what it was to be. One had somehow to discover and tread the hard, between the sloughs of fearing the worst and hoping for the best.”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Long View

“How the alternative reduces one's prospect and petrifies the imagination in a way that the possibility can never do. Possibilities, innumerable and tightly packed, could shower forth like mushroom spore between such alternatives as being here, or there; alive, or dead; and old, or young.”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Long View

“One wanted children; had them, and brought them up: and then, in spite of all the calculations of time and care, they defeated one by producing a result which seemed, to say the least, almost mathematically incorrect.”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Long View

“together,”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Long View

“... the house seemed filled with dusty sunlight, which rose politely from wherever it had been resting on floors and windowsills, and then hung motionless and golden in the air until they moved to another room.”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Long View

“Alone, without the looking-glass of another person’s presence, the mirrors of the imagination sometimes effect cunning distortions. By”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Long View

“I do not like the people who read fifteen books by a man who has written three worth reading.’ ‘But if one enjoys reading, one must be resigned to many disappointments.’ ‘Disappointments – certainly. But if you read a book and are disappointed, it is because you intended to be pleased.”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Long View

“do not like the people who read fifteen books by a man who has written three worth reading.’ ‘But if one enjoys reading, one must be resigned to many disappointments.’ ‘Disappointments – certainly. But if you read a book and are disappointed, it is because you intended to be pleased.”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Long View