Rosamond Lehmann Quotes

#1. How long, I wonder, will ignorance spell purity and knowledge shame?

Rosamond Lehmann

#2. Anything that becomes a cult, or a mass movement, loses its moral and spiritual value. The crusade has to be personal, individual. As soon as it becomes collective it loses its purpose.

Rosamond Lehmann

#3. In a corner of the churchyard grew a plantation of white violets, enormously plump and prosperous-looking ... I saw the dead stretched out under me in the earth, feeding these flowers with a thin milk drawn from their bones.

Rosamond Lehmann

#4. Yes, we are sure of it. These walls enclose a world. Here is continuity spinning a web from room to room, from year to year. It is safe in this house.

Rosamond Lehmann

#5. [On Ian Fleming:] The trouble with Ian is that he gets off with women because he can't get on with them.

Rosamond Lehmann

#6. When two people unite, kindness must be mutual, or shocking things will happen.

Rosamond Lehmann

#7. Holidays, if you enjoy them, have no history.

Rosamond Lehmann

#8. I want to do something absolutely different, or perhaps nothing at all: just stay where I am, in my home, and absorb each hour, each day, and be alone; and read and think; and walk about the garden in the night; and wait, wait...

Rosamond Lehmann

#9. The novel will never die, but it will keep changing and evolving and taking different shapes.

Rosamond Lehmann

#10. One can present people with opportunities. One cannot make them equal to them.

Rosamond Lehmann

#11. The fact is, one shouldn't go to parties when one is in love. It makes one act aloof and superior and everyone distrusts you.

Rosamond Lehmann

#12. Still, now and then they seemed to be holding behind them the surprising, the magic vistas of childhood - the sudden snow at night, whirling and furring without sound against the window; the full moon and all its shadows on the lawn; the Christmas sleigh and reindeer in the sky.

Rosamond Lehmann

#13. People have been saying the novel is dead for as far back as I can remember. The novel will never die, but it will keep changing and evolving and taking different shapes. Storytelling, which is the basis of the novel, has always existed and always will.

Rosamond Lehmann

#14. It's the thought that counts.

Rosamond Lehmann

#15. But poetry is not to be lived, except for the few to whom it is more important than self-preservation.

Rosamond Lehmann

#16. One must have the humility and the imagination to honor all deep human experiences - not least those one has never come near to sharing.

Rosamond Lehmann

#17. Convention is another name for the habits of society.

Rosamond Lehmann

#18. One should always act from one's inner sense of rhythm.

Rosamond Lehmann

#19. It'll all come right. Because, of course, I do believe...I believe - I believe in everything...sun, moon, stars, in seasons - trees, flowers - people, music, life...yes, in life.

Rosamond Lehmann