Top 36 Jan Struther Quotes
#1. Giving a party is like having a baby: its conception is more fun than its completion; and once you have begun it, it is almost impossible to stop.
Jan Struther
#2. How much of the fun of parenthood lay in watching the children remake, with delighted wonder, one's own discoveries.
Jan Struther
#3. One is what one remembers: no more, no less.
Jan Struther
#4. The importance of the ordinary citizen is very greatly underestimated - not so much by those in authority as by the ordinary citizen himself.
Jan Struther
#6. [Y]ou cannot successfully navigate the future unless you keep always framed beside it a small clear image of the past.
Jan Struther
#7. When there is a world scarcity of any commodity, whether it's food or free speech, then the whole world must go on rations in order that eventually the whole world may have it again in plenty.
Jan Struther
#8. To be entirely at leisure for one day is to be for one day an immortal
Jan Struther
#9. To be put down in this world, and given only eighty years to get to know it in, is like being let loose in the United States of America for the first time with a high-powered car and unlimited gasoline - but with a visa that is valid for only a week. It's agonizing, that's what it is.
Jan Struther
#10. This was the cream of marriage, this nightly turning out of the day's pocketful of memories, this deft habitual sharing of two pairs of eyes, two pairs of ears. It gave you, in a sense, almost a double life: though never, on the other hand, quite a single one.
Jan Struther
#11. For to love, loveless, is a bitter pill:But to be loved, unloving, bitterer still.
Jan Struther
#12. Constructive destruction is one of the most delightful employments in the world, and in civilized life the opportunities for it are only too rare.
Jan Struther
#13. Hard words will break no bones:
But more than bones are broken
By the inescapable stones
Of fond words left unspoken.
Jan Struther
#14. It's as important to marry the right life as it is the right person.
Jan Struther
#15. [A] certain degree of un-understanding (not mis-, but un-) is the only possible sanctuary which one human being can offer to another in the midst of the devastating intimacy of a happy marriage.
Jan Struther
#16. O love's a simple word to sayWith nature aiding and abetting
Jan Struther
#17. Nature has decreed that for what men suffer by having to shave, be killed in battle, and eat the legs of chickens, women make amends by housekeeping, childbirth, and writing all the letters for both of them ...
Jan Struther
#18. Private opinion creates public opinion. Public opinion overflows eventually into national behavior as things are arranged at present, can make or mar the world. That is why private opinion, and private behavior, and private conversation are so terrifyingly important.
Jan Struther
#19. It seemed to her sometimes that the most important thing about marriage was not a home or children or a remedy against sin, but simply there being always an eye to catch.
Jan Struther
#20. I can't abide cats myself, but of course we have to have one in the kitchen to deal with the mice. I insisted on getting a black one, because anything else shows the dirt so in London.
Jan Struther
#21. Librarianship is one of the few callings in the world for which is it still possible to feel unqualified admiration and respect.
Jan Struther
#22. [Gardening] is a means by which you can attain many valuable hours of solitude without being thought unsociable.
Jan Struther
#23. In childhood the daylight always fails too soon
except when there are going to be fireworks;
Jan Struther
#24. Swans ... always look as though they'd just been reading their own fan-mail.
Jan Struther
#26. [T]he mechanics of life should never be allowed to interfere with living.
Jan Struther
#27. Left wing ... Right wing ... it's so limited; why doesn't it ever occur to any of them that what one is really longing for is the wishbone?
Jan Struther
#28. It oughtn't to need a war to make us talk to each other in buses, and invent our own amusements in the evenings, and live simply, and eat sparingly, and recover the use of our legs, and get up early enough to see the sun rise.
Jan Struther
#29. Clem Miniver: She was a good cook, as good cooks go. And as good cooks go, she went.
Jan Struther
#30. To visit a new country for the first time is great fun; but it is even greater fun to introduce somebody else to a country that you know.
Jan Struther
#31. That's what any decent mind ought to do for its owner when she lets it off the leash - just go bounding away into the long grass and bring back a really profound thought, laying it at her feet all furry and palpitating. C'mon now. Hey los'!
Jan Struther
#32. It was more like a form of claustrophobia
a dread of exchanging the freedom of her own self-imposed routine for the inescapable burden of somebody else's.
Jan Struther
#33. Words were the only net to catch a mood, the only sure weapon against oblivion.
Jan Struther
#34. The worst of gardening is that it's so full of metaphors one hardly knows where to begin.
Jan Struther
#35. It took me forty years on earth To reach this sure conclusion: There is no Heaven but clarity, No Hell except confusion.
Jan Struther
#36. To achieve unity without uniformity is the whole essence of the democratic way of life.
Jan Struther
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