Beverley Nichols Quotes

#1. Let us be honest: most of us rather like our cats to have a streak of wickedness. I should not feel quite easy in the company of any cat that walked around the house with a saintly expression.

Beverley Nichols

#2. By the way, the best place to find names for fictional characters, if you are ever foolish enough to write a novel, is in a Bradshaw or an ABC. All the nicest people always sound like railway stations.

Beverley Nichols

#3. I think it is silly to be amateur about anything when one has an opportunity of learning.

Beverley Nichols

#4. To be overcome by the fragrance of flowers is a delectable form of defeat.

Beverley Nichols

#5. The seed of a blue lupin will usually produce a blue lupin. But the seed of a blue-eyed man may produce a brown-eyed bore ... especially if his wife has a taste for gigolos.

Beverley Nichols

#6. For a garden is a mistress, and gardening is a blend of all the arts, and if it is not the death of me, sooner or later, I shall be much surprised.

Beverley Nichols

#7. To dig one's own spade into one's own earth! Has life anything better to offer than this?

Beverley Nichols

#8. We both know, you and I, that if all men were gardeners, the world at last would be at peace.

Beverley Nichols

#9. Do you ever find yourself bursting into a sort of lunatic laughter at the sheer prettiness of things?

Beverley Nichols

#10. As any psychologist will tell you, the worst thing you can possibly do to a woman is to deprive her of a grievance.

Beverley Nichols

#11. A gardener is never shut out from his garden, wherever he may be. Its comfort never fails. Though the city may close about him, and the grime and soot descend upon him, he can still wander in his garden, does he but close his eyes.

Beverley Nichols

#12. It is only to the gardener that time is a friend, giving each year more than he steals.

Beverley Nichols

#13. Well, I love geraniums, and anybody who does not love geraniums must obviously be a depraved and loathsome person.

Beverley Nichols

#14. Into the room, with great dignity, stalked One and Four. They had mud on their paws, and they naturally decided to sit on my lap. They smelt of moss and loam, and they both set up a slow, tranquil purr. Cats, I thought, are the best.

Beverley Nichols

#15. ...He was succeeded by a gentleman who gazed at the Brussels sprouts and asked if the funny little knobs on the stalks were a form of disease. I told him yes. Eczema.

Beverley Nichols

#16. ...A thing that is worth doing at all is worth doing badly... le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.

Beverley Nichols

#17. ...a cyclamen that looks like a flight of butterflies, frozen for a single, exquisite moment in the white heart of Time...

Beverley Nichols

#18. I had never 'taken a cutting' before ... Do you realize that the whole thing is miraculous? It is exactly as though you were to cut off your wife's leg, stick it in the lawn, and be greeted on the following day by an entirely new woman, sprung from the leg, advancing across the lawn to meet you.

Beverley Nichols

#19. Every moment of this strange and lovely life from dawn to dusk, is a miracle. Somewhere, always a rose is opening its petals to the dawn. Somewhere, always, a flower is fading in the dusk.

Beverley Nichols

#20. I want to wear out,' he [Oldfield] said very softly. 'To wear out. Not to rust out.

Beverley Nichols

#21. A garden is a place for shaping a little world of your own according to your heart's desire.

Beverley Nichols

#22. Marriage is a book in which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.

Beverley Nichols