Top 72 Nancy Mitford Quotes
#1. There are worse things than poverty, though I can't for the moment remember what they are ...
Nancy Mitford
#2. Surely a King who loves pleasure is less dangerous than one who loves glory?
Nancy Mitford
#3. My dear Lady Kroesig, I have only read one book in my life, and that is 'White Fang.' It's so frightfully good I've never bothered to read another.
Nancy Mitford
#5. Frenchwomen always give one to understand that arranging themselves is full-time work.
Nancy Mitford
#6. The charm of your writing," Evelyn Waugh once wrote to Mitford, "depends on your refusal to recognize a distinction between girlish chatter and literary language.
Nancy Mitford
#7. Nothing about human beings ever had the power to move me as a child. Black Beauty now ... !
Nancy Mitford
#8. I do love translating; it is the pure pleasure of writing without the misery of inventing.
Nancy Mitford
#9. Life itself, she thought, as she went upstairs to dress for dinner, was stranger than dreams and far, far more disordered.
Nancy Mitford
#10. To make matters worse, Linda, it appears, is madly in love with a monster of a Scotsman, who came to dinner last night in his kilt. Those hairy old knees decided us. "The Mountains I can bear," said Loudie. "Natives in the semi-nude at dinner time is another matter. I leave tomorrow.
Nancy Mitford
#12. Oh dear ... it really is rather disillusioning. When one's friends marry for money they are wretched, when they marry for love it is worse. What is the proper thing to marry for, I should like to know?
Nancy Mitford
#13. When the loo paper gets thicker and the writing paper thinner, it's always a bad sign, at home.
Nancy Mitford
#14. But I couldn't think it more hateful of them to have taken my fur tippet. Burglars never seem to realize one might feel the cold. How would they like it if I took away their wife's shawl?
Nancy Mitford
#15. Sisters are a shield against life's cruel adversity.
Nancy Mitford
#16. Americans relate all effort, all work, and all of life itself to the dollar. Their talk is of nothing but dollars.
Nancy Mitford
#17. Oh, the spectacles - I have to wear them when I go abroad, I have such kind eyes you see, beggars and things cluster round and annoy me.
Nancy Mitford
#18. I am sometimes bored by people, but never by life.
Nancy Mitford
#19. Even if I take him out for three hours every day, and go and chat to him for another hour, that leaves twenty hours for him all alone with nothing to do. Oh, why can't dogs read?
Nancy Mitford
#20. It was furnished neither in good taste nor in bad taste, but simply with no attempt at taste at all ...
Nancy Mitford
#21. Women are divided into two categories: those who can deal with the men they are in love with, and those who cannot. Sophia was one of those who can.
Nancy Mitford
#22. The worst of being a Communist is the parties you may go to are - well - awfully funny and touching but not very gay ... I don't see the point of sad parties, do you? And Left-wing people are always sad because they mind dreadfully about their causes, and the causes are always going so badly.
Nancy Mitford
#23. It was the very worst kind of Banbury-Road house, depressing, with laurels. The front door was opened by a slut. I had never seen a slut before but recognized the genus without difficulty as soon as I set eyes on this one.
Nancy Mitford
#24. You've no idea how long life goes on and how many, many changes it brings. Young people seem to imagine that it's over in a flash, that they do this thing, or that thing, and then die, but I can assure you they are quite wrong.
Nancy Mitford
#25. Greece is not a country of happy mediums: everything there seems to be either wonderful or horrible ...
Nancy Mitford
#26. Chickens are cheerless birds, I advise you to keep geese which can be taught to follow like dogs, one needs all the companionship one can get in these days.
Nancy Mitford
#27. Indeed, with the Radletts, you never could tell. Why, for instance, would Victoria bellow like a bull and half kill Jassy whenever Jassy said, in a certain tone of voice, pointing her finger with a certain look, "Fancy?" I think they hardly knew why, themselves.
Nancy Mitford
#28. Always remember, children, that marriage is a very intimate relationship. It's not just sitting and chatting to a person; there are other things, you know.
Nancy Mitford
#29. Madame de Pompadour excelled at an art which the majority of human beings thoroughly despise because it is unprofitable and ephemeral: the art of living.
Nancy Mitford
#30. Love indeed - whoever invented love ought to be shot.
Nancy Mitford
#31. To fall in love you have to be in the state of mind for it to take, like a disease.
Nancy Mitford
#32. Men, in general, are so treacherous, so envious, and so cruel that it is a comfort to find one who is only weak.
Nancy Mitford
#33. Houses are entirely different when you know them well, she thought, and on first acquaintance even more different from their real selves, more deceptive about their real character than human beings.
Nancy Mitford
#34. Life is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake, and here is one of them.
Nancy Mitford
#35. A typical Irish dinner would be: cream flavored with lobster, cream with bits of veal in it, green peas and cream, cream cheese, cream flavored with strawberries.
Nancy Mitford
#36. Most people like reading about what they already know - there is even a public for yesterday's weather.
Nancy Mitford
#37. I should love a dear little blind rat,' said Wendy, and added in a contemplative voice: 'I sometimes wish I were blind you know, so that I needn't see my tooth water after I've spat it.
Nancy Mitford
#38. The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life's essential unfairness.
Nancy Mitford
#39. If I had a girl I should say to her, 'Marry for love if you can, it won't last, but it is a very interesting experience and makes a good beginning in life. Later on, when you marry for money, for heaven's sake let it be big money. There are no other possible reasons for marrying at all.
Nancy Mitford
#40. But I think she would have been happy with Fabrice,' I said. 'He was the great love of her life, you know.'
Oh, dulling,' said my mother, sadly. 'One always thinks that. Every, every time.
Nancy Mitford
#41. Spring came late, but when it came it was hand-in-hand with summer, and almost at once everything was baking and warm, and in the villages the people danced every night on concrete dancing floors under the plane trees ...
Nancy Mitford
#42. Always be civil to the girls, you never know who they may marry' is a aphorism which has saved many an English spinster from being treated like an Indian widow.
Nancy Mitford
#43. Just at the moment he's writing a book on famine - goodness! it's sad - and there's a dear little Chinese comrade who comes and tells him what famine is like, you never saw such a fat man in your life.
Nancy Mitford
#44. Mother, of course, takes a lot of exercise, walks and so on. And every morning she puts on a pair of black silk drawers and a sweater and makes indelicate gestures on the lawn. That's called Building the Body Beautiful. She's mad about it.
Nancy Mitford
#45. Children should be like waffles
you should be able to throw the first one away.
Nancy Mitford
#46. She ... ran away so often, and with so many different people, that she became known to her family and friends as the Bolter ...
Nancy Mitford
#47. One thing about tourists is that it is very easy to get away from them. Like ants they follow a trail and a few yards each side of that trail there are none.
Nancy Mitford
#49. An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off; it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.
Nancy Mitford
#50. Always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair they loved or they loathed, they lived in a world of superlatives
Nancy Mitford
#51. Do you always laugh when you make love?' said Fabrice.
I hadn't thought about it, but I suppose I do. I generally laugh when I'm happy and cry when I'm not. Do you find it odd?
Nancy Mitford
#52. In France that is the one rule, never make trouble.
Nancy Mitford
#53. People in towns are always preoccupied. 'Have I missed the bus? Have I forgotten the potatoes? Can I get across the road?
Nancy Mitford
#54. Irish gardens beat all for horror. With 19 gardeners, Lord Talbot of Malahide has produced an affair exactly like a suburban golf course.
Nancy Mitford
#55. The English lord marries for love, and is rather inclined to love where money is.
Nancy Mitford
#56. Talk about what you know and you won't get so angry
Nancy Mitford
#57. English doctors have killed 3/4 of my friends & the joke is the remaining 1/4 go on recommending them, so odd is human nature.
Nancy Mitford
#58. It only shows, said Aunt Sadie, that nothing really matters the least bit, so why make these fearful efforts to keep alive?
Oh, but it's the efforts that one enjoys so much, said Davey...
Nancy Mitford
#59. Behind us hung a Correggio St. Sebastian with the habitual Buchmanite expression on his face. "Awful tripe," said Uncle Matthew. "Fella wouldn't be grinning, he'd be dead with all those arrows in him.
Nancy Mitford
#60. Nothing makes people crosser than being considered too old for love ...
Nancy Mitford
#61. There they are, held like flies, in the amber of that moment ...
Nancy Mitford
#62. Nobody ought to write books before they're thirty. I hate precocity.
Nancy Mitford
#63. It's a funny thing that people are always ready to admit it if they've no talent for drawing or music, whereas everyone imagines that they themselves are capable of true love, which is a talent like any other, only far more rare.
Nancy Mitford
#64. Oh poor Octave, no luck at all, as usual," said Madame Rocher, "he is still with his regiment, still only a captain. Of course, if it hadn't been for this wretched war, he would be at least a colonel by now.
Nancy Mitford
#65. I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.
Nancy Mitford
#66. One's emotions are intensified in Paris - one can be more happy and also more unhappy here than in any other place. But it is always a positive source of joy to live here, and there is nobody so miserable as a Parisian in exile from his town.
Nancy Mitford
#67. Linda's presentation of the 'facts' had been so gruesome that the children left Alconleigh howling dismally, their nerves permanently impaired, their future chances of a sane and happy sex life much reduced.
Nancy Mitford
#68. I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened.
Nancy Mitford
#69. Suddenly, just in time, I realised that he was a filthy Hun, so of course I turned my back on him and refused to shake hands. I think he noticed; anyway, I hope so. I hope he felt his position - General Murgatroyd
Nancy Mitford
#70. Oh! How like a woman," Davey said. "Sex, my dear Sadie, is not a sovereign cure for everything, you know. I only wish it were.
Nancy Mitford
#71. At this Linda gave up. Children might or might not enjoy air-raids actually in progress, but a child who was not thrilled by the idea of them was incomprehensible to her, and she could not imagine having conceived such a being. Useless to waste any more time and breath on this unnatural little girl.
Nancy Mitford
#72. They spoke as though these Princes are so remote from life as we know it that the smallest sign of humanity, the mere fact even that they communicated by means of speech was worth noting and proclaiming.
Nancy Mitford
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