Top 100 Dodie Smith Quotes
#1. One of the library occupants was Lawrence Beesley, a Dulwich College science master seeking new chances in America (his small son grew up to marry Dodie Smith, the author of The 101 Dalmatians).
Richard Davenport-Hines
#2. Was I the only woman in the world who, at my age - and after a lifetime of quite rampant independence - still did not quite feel grown up?
Dodie Smith
#4. In addition, I think religion has a chance of a look-in whenever the mind craves solace in music or poetry
in any form of art at all. Personally, I think it is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communication all the other arts attempt.
Dodie Smith
#5. Then we danced the tune through again, without saying one word - indeed, we never spoke all the time we were dancing. I can't remember that I even thought. I seemed to move with a pleasure that was mindless.
Dodie Smith
#6. Is that branch worrying you?" Simon asked her. "Would you like to change places? I hope you wouldn't because your hair looks so nice against the leaves
Dodie Smith
#7. I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring.
Dodie Smith
#9. I had found out in that glittering corridor off the ballroom that being with him could be more painful than being away from him.
Dodie Smith
#10. Even a broken heart doesn't warrant a waste of good paper.
Dodie Smith
#11. Miserable people cannot afford to dislike each other
Dodie Smith
#12. And at last father flung the rug off as if it were hampering him and strode over to the table saying, 'cocoa, cocoa!'
it might have been the most magnificent drink in the world; which, personally, I think it is.
Dodie Smith
#13. I decided that it was like the difference between the beautiful old Godsend graves and the new ones open to receive coffins (which I never can bear to look at); that time takes the ugliness and horror out of death and turns it into beauty.
Dodie Smith
#14. There is something revolting about the way girls' minds so often jump to marriage long before they jump to love.
Dodie Smith
#15. We lose more women to marriage than war, famine, and disease.
Smith Dodie
#16. And suddenly all the puppies were her puppies; she was their mother - just as Pongo had felt he was their father.
Dodie Smith
#17. There used to be two of us always on the look-out for life, talking to Miss Blossom at night, wondering, hoping; two Bronte-Jane Austen girls, poor but spirited, two Girls of Godsend Castle.
Dodie Smith
#18. Only the margin left to write on now. I love you, I love you, I love you.
Dodie Smith
#19. It's a beautiful sight to see good dancers doing simple steps. It's a painful sight to see beginners doing complicated patterns.
Dodie Smith
#20. It's odd how different a house feels when one is alone in it. It makes it easier to think rather private thoughts ...
Dodie Smith
#22. Walking down Belmotte was the oddest sensation
every step took us deeper into the mist until at last it closed over our heads. It was like being drowned in the ghost of water.
Dodie Smith
#23. Things you let yourself imagine happening, never do happen.
Dodie Smith
#24. I wanted to know more about the young ... strange that though they laughed so loud, they so seldom smiled. Perhaps laughter was involuntary whereas smiling was part of an attitude to life.
Dodie Smith
#27. It was so nice that Simon was here for it - tell him I enjoyed every minute - ' it was glorious writing that - almost like telling him I was glad he'd kissed me. But after I'd posted the letter I was worried in case he guessed what I'd meant.
Dodie Smith
#28. I shouldn't think even millionaires could eat anything nicer than new bread and real butter and honey for tea.
Dodie Smith
#29. You're the kind of child who might develop a passion for Bach.
I told him I hadn't at school. The one Bach piece I learnt made me feel I was being repeatedly hit on the head with a teaspoon.
Dodie Smith
#31. My God - it's a green child!" said the American. "What is this place - the House of Usher?
Dodie Smith
#32. And I suspect that, to the eyes of love, love shows. I knew about you as well as about myself, almost from the beginning.
Dodie Smith
#33. I heard Molly say, 'Our Mouse is a hundred miles away.' But I wasn't as far away as that; I was in a dimly lit street somewhere in Hampstead.
Dodie Smith
#34. I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness.
Dodie Smith
#36. Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you even more than suffering yourself can.
Dodie Smith
#39. If you love people, you take them on trust.
Dodie Smith
#40. I think it [religion] is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communion all the other arts attempt.
Dodie Smith
#41. There was a wonderful atmosphere of gentle age, a smell of flowers and beeswax, sweet yet faintly sour and musty; a smell that makes you feel very tender towards the past.
Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle
#42. I couldn't make it out - why you ever let me, I mean. I understand now. Things like that happen when you're in love with the wrong person. Worse things. Things you never forgive yourself for.
Dodie Smith
#43. Is it wrong for me to feel so happy? Perhaps I ought even to feel guilty? No. I didn't make it happen, and it can't hurt anyone but me. Surely I have a right to my joy. For as long as it lasts ...
Dodie Smith
#45. What with books and chocolate, there's not much else you could have in it, is there?
Dodie Smith
#46. That little glow of comfort lasted me right through the evening but was gone when I woke up next morning. Wakings are the worst times
almost before my eyes are open a great weight seems to roll on to my heart.
Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle
#47. Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.
Dodie Smith
#49. I should rather like to tear these last pages out of the book. Shall I? No-a journal ought not to cheat.
Dodie Smith
#50. I glanced through another page in case I had missed something, and came to the description of Simon's face as he lay on the grass with his eyes closed. It gave me a stab in which happiness and misery were somehow a part of each other.
Dodie Smith
#52. I found it quite easy to carry on a casual conversation it was as if my real feelings were down fathoms deep in my mind and what we said was just a feathery surface spray.
Dodie Smith
#53. But her voice sounded wistful. It is one of her theories that a woman must never be jealous, never try to hold man against his will; but I could tell that she hadn't enjoyed seeing someone else bring father to life.
Dodie Smith
#54. But it is always dreadful when the pictures in front of one's eyes become meaningless and the real word is there instead and seems meaningless, too.
Dodie Smith
#55. I love you, I love you, I love you. ~Cassandra
Dodie Smith
#56. I wanted so terribly to be good to him.
Dodie Smith
#57. A loss of sensibility follows a loss of innocence, at once a penalty and a compensation.
Dodie Smith
#58. I like seeing people when they can't see me.
Dodie Smith
#60. I wasn't merely remembering, it seemed to be trapped inside my eyelids.
Dodie Smith
#62. I believe it is customary to get one's washing over first in baths and bask afterwards; personally, I bask first. I have discovered that the first few minutes are the best and not to be wasted
my brain always seethes with ideas and life suddenly looks much better than did.
Dodie Smith
#63. Truthfulness so often goes with ruthlessness.
Dodie Smith
#64. She will want things to stay just as they are. She will never have the fun of hoping something wonderful and exiting may be just around the corner.
Dodie Smith
#65. Cruel blows of fate call for extreme kindness in the family circle.
Dodie Smith
#66. The table was a pool of candlelight -- so bright that the rest of the room seemed almost black, with the faces of the family portraits floating in the darkness.
Dodie Smith
#67. The vague expression was gone from his eyes - I had a feeling it was gone forever.
Dodie Smith
#68. Perhaps what you call conventionality, I call decency.
Dodie Smith
#69. Thinking of death
strange, beautiful, terrible and a long way off
made me feel happier than ever.
Dodie Smith
#70. Am I really admitting that my sister is determined to marry a man she has only seen once and doesn't much like the look of? It is half real and half pretense - and I have an idea that it is a game most girls play when they meet an eligible young men. They just ... wonder.
Dodie Smith
#71. I leaned against the carved banisters and listened to the music and felt quite different from any way I have ever felt before
softer, very beautiful and as if a great many men were in love with me and I might very easily be in love with them.
Dodie Smith
#72. Ah, but you're the insidious type
Jane Eyre with of touch of Becky Sharp. A thoroughly dangerous girl.
Dodie Smith
#73. As she only cries about once a year I really ought to have gone over and comforted her, but I wanted to set it all down here. I begin to see that writers are liable to become callous.
Dodie Smith
#74. But some characters in books are really real
Jane Austen's are; and I know those five Bennets at the opening of Pride and Prejudice, simply waiting to raven the young men at Netherfield Park, are not giving one thought to the real facts of marriage.
Dodie Smith
#75. Perhaps he finds beauty saddening
I do myself sometimes. Once when I was quite little I asked father why this was and he explained that it was due to our knowledge of beauty's evanescence, which reminds us that we ourselves shall die.
Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle
#76. People do look different with their eyes closed, their features seem so much more sculptured.
Dodie Smith
#77. Simon: You always were wise beyond your years.
Cassandra: No I wasn't. I used to be consciously naive.
Dodie Smith
#78. I have noticed that when things happen in one's imaginings, they never happen in one's life, so I am curbing myself.
Dodie Smith
#79. The tea was a comfort - and by that time I more than needed comfort.
Dodie Smith
#80. I could marry the Devil himself if he had some money.
Dodie Smith
#81. It is rather exciting to write by moonlight.
Dodie Smith
#82. She is a girl who cannot walk her troubles off, or work them off; she is a girl to sit around and glare.
Dodie Smith
#83. Like many other much-loved humans, they believed that they owned their dogs, instead of realizing that their dogs owned them.
Dodie Smith
#84. I only want to write. And there's no college for that except life.
Dodie Smith
#85. Once I really looked at the sky, I wanted to go on looking; it seemed to draw me towards it and make me listen hard, though there was nothing to listen to, not so much as a twig was stirring.
Dodie Smith
#86. The way one's mind can dash about just while one opens a window.
Dodie Smith
#87. I could never explain how the image and the reality merge, and how they somehow extend and beautify each other.
Dodie Smith
#88. Oh, it is wonderful to wake up in the morning with things to look forward to!
Dodie Smith
#89. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
Dodie Smith
#90. Oh I daresay she can't help it - she's one of the women who oughn't be loved too kindly when they are some primitive desire for brutality makes them try to provoke it.
Dodie Smith
#91. My imagination longs to dash ahead and plan developments; but I have noticed that when things happen in one's imagination, they never happen in one's life.
Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle
#92. Still, looking through the old volumes was soothing, because thinking of the past made the present seem a little less real.
Dodie Smith
#93. I have really sinned. I am going to pause now, and sit here on the mound repenting in deepest shame ...
Dodie Smith
#94. Perhaps if I make myself write I shall find out what is wrong with me.
Dodie Smith
#95. While I have been writing I have lived in the past, the light of it has been all around me ...
Dodie Smith
#96. said, "because he was at the British Museum.
Dodie Smith
#97. I wonder if there isn't a catch about having plenty of money? Does it eventually take the pleasure out of things?
Dodie Smith
#98. Your pain and anger will pass, but the guilt would remain with you for always.
Dodie Smith
#100. It is the still, yellow kind of afternoon when one is apt to get stuck in a dream if one sits very quiet
Dodie Smith
