Top 100 Mitford Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Mitford would simply like to be the pause that refreshes.'
Jan Karon
#3. Nancy: sisters are a shield against life's cruel adversity.
Decca: sisters are life's cruel adversity.
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family
Mary S. Lovell
#4. I love the Bronte sisters, but I feel a closer kinship to the Ephron sisters, Nora and Delia, if only because their work makes me laugh more than the Brontes. I also love the Mitford sisters with their secret language and their endless letters back and forth.
Kate Klise
#5. Cutcutcutcutcutcut . . . At 4:10, the machine lifted off the roof of Mitford Hospital and, in the starless night, burned itself away.
Jan Karon
#6. MITFORD BOOKS BY JAN KARON At Home in Mitford A Light in the Window These High, Green Hills Out to Canaan A New Song A Common Life In This Mountain Shepherds Abiding Light from Heaven Home to Holly Springs In the Company of Others Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good
Jan Karon
#7. There are worse things than poverty, though I can't for the moment remember what they are ...
Nancy Mitford
#8. Surely a King who loves pleasure is less dangerous than one who loves glory?
Nancy Mitford
#9. 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
#11. Frenchwomen always give one to understand that arranging themselves is full-time work.
Nancy Mitford
#12. When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When "Somebody Up There" - a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator - so decrees.
Jessica Mitford
#13. Picking other people's brains is an art worth cultivating.
Jessica Mitford
#14. Enemies are, to me, as important as friends in my life, and when they die I mourn their passing.
Jessica Mitford
#15. No fear of forgetting the good-humoured faces that meet us in our walks each day.
Mary Russell Mitford
#16. I place flowers in the very first rank of simple pleasures; and I have no very good opinion of the hard worldly people who take no delight in them.
Mary Russell Mitford
#17. [On Elizabeth Barrett Browning:] ... for finish, and melody of versification, there is nothing approaching to Miss Barrett in this day, or in any other - also for diction. Her words paint.
Mary Russell Mitford
#18. I have nothing against undertakers personally. It's just that I wouldn't want one to bury my sister.
Jessica Mitford
#19. Nothing about human beings ever had the power to move me as a child. Black Beauty now ... !
Nancy Mitford
#20. I do love translating; it is the pure pleasure of writing without the misery of inventing.
Nancy Mitford
#21. Life itself, she thought, as she went upstairs to dress for dinner, was stranger than dreams and far, far more disordered.
Nancy Mitford
#22. To think of playing cricket for hard cash! Money and gentility would ruin any pastime under the sun.
Mary Russell Mitford
#23. You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.
Jessica Mitford
#24. 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
#26. Things on the whole are faster in America; people don't stand for election, they run for office. If a person says he's sick, it doesn't mean regurgitating, it means ill. Mad means angry, not insane. Don't ask for the left-luggage; it's called a checkroom.
Jessica Mitford
#27. 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
#29. When the loo paper gets thicker and the writing paper thinner, it's always a bad sign, at home.
Nancy Mitford
#30. Knowing few children of my age with whom to compare notes, I envied the children of literature to whom interesting things were always happening ...
Jessica Mitford
#31. Prejudices of taste, likings and dislikings, are not always vanquishable by reason ...
Mary Russell Mitford
#32. I have discovered that our great favorite, Miss Austen, is my countrywoman ... with whom mamma before her marriage was acquainted. Mamma says that she was then the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers ...
Mary Russell Mitford
#33. Growing up in the English countryside seemed an interminable process. Freezing winter gave way to frosty spring, which in turn merged into chilly summer-but nothing ever, ever happened.
Jessica Mitford
#34. 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
#35. Sisters are a shield against life's cruel adversity.
Nancy Mitford
#36. Americans relate all effort, all work, and all of life itself to the dollar. Their talk is of nothing but dollars.
Nancy Mitford
#37. 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
#38. I am sometimes bored by people, but never by life.
Nancy Mitford
#39. 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
#40. It was furnished neither in good taste nor in bad taste, but simply with no attempt at taste at all ...
Nancy Mitford
#41. We may admire people for being wise, but we like them best when they are foolish.
Mary Russell Mitford
#42. 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
#43. I detest so much ... those persons, who insist upon telling you everything - who labor every point, as the lawyers say, as if they thought all excellence consisted in length ...
Mary Russell Mitford
#44. 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
#45. The power of admiring whatever is deserving of admiration, the nice and quick perception of the beautiful and the true, is one of the highest and noblest of our faculties, born of taste, and knowledge, and wisdom, or rather it is taste, and wisdom, and knowledge, in one rare and great combination.
Mary Russell Mitford
#46. 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
#47. I have still the best comforts of life - books and friendships - and I trust never to lose my relish for either.
Mary Russell Mitford
#48. 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
#49. Greece is not a country of happy mediums: everything there seems to be either wonderful or horrible ...
Nancy Mitford
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. A novel should be as like life as a painting, but not as like life as a piece of waxwork.
Mary Russell Mitford
#53. I discovered that Human Nature was not, as I had always supposed, a fixed and unalterable entity, that wars are not caused by a natural urge in men to fight, that ownership of land and factories is not necessarily the natural reward of greater wisdom and energy.
Jessica Mitford
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Love indeed - whoever invented love ought to be shot.
Nancy Mitford
#57. To fall in love you have to be in the state of mind for it to take, like a disease.
Nancy Mitford
#59. She was the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly ever.
Mary Russell Mitford
#60. 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
#61. Gracious dying is a huge, macabre and expensive joke on the American public.
Jessica Mitford
#62. They know little of the passions who seek to argue with that most intractable of them all, the fear that is born of love.
Mary Russell Mitford
#63. 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
#64. Life is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake, and here is one of them.
Nancy Mitford
#65. A thirteen-year-old is a kaleidoscope of different personalities, if not in most ways a mere figment of her own imagination. At that age, what and who you are depends largely on what book you happen to be reading at the moment.
Jessica Mitford
#67. 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
#68. Our English people are much addicted to raising idols, and then revenging themselves on their own idolatry by knocking down and demolishing the poor bits of wood and stone that they had worshipped as gods. How many literary reputations have been so treated!
Mary Russell Mitford
#69. Most people like reading about what they already know - there is even a public for yesterday's weather.
Nancy Mitford
#70. 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
#71. Society created the prison in its own image; will history, with its penchant for paradox, reverse those roles?
Jessica Mitford
#72. In childbirth, as in other human endeavors, fashions start with the rich, are then adopted by the aspirant middle class with an assist from the ever-watchful media, and may or may not eventually filter down to the poor.
Jessica Mitford
#73. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? Where, indeed. Many a badly stung survivor, faced with the aftermath of some relative's funeral, has ruefully concluded that the victory has been won hands down by a funeral establishment - in disastrously unequal battle.
Jessica Mitford
#74. The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life's essential unfairness.
Nancy Mitford
#75. 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
#76. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. Things on the whole are much faster in America; people don't 'stand for election', they 'run for office.'
Jessica Mitford
#81. 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
#82. Well, great authors are great people - but I believe that they are best seen at a distance.
Mary Russell Mitford
#83. Prison walls are meant not only to keep convicts in, but to keep the would-be investigator out.
Jessica Mitford
#85. Lifelong enemies are, I think, as hard to make and as important to one's well-being as lifelong friends.
Jessica Mitford
#86. Now there is a society where the funeral industry got completely out of control.
Jessica Mitford
#87. [On Elizabeth Barrett Browning:] Her sweetness of character is even beyond her genius.
Mary Russell Mitford
#88. 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
#89. Children should be like waffles
you should be able to throw the first one away.
Nancy Mitford
#90. 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
#91. That bad letters of every kind arise from want of the habit of thinking, I cannot doubt.
Mary Russell Mitford
#92. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. I foresee that the Andersen and Fairy Tale fashion will not last; none of these things away from general nature do.
Mary Russell Mitford
#100. The character and mentality of the keepers may be of more importance in understanding prisons than the character and mentality of the kept.
Jessica Mitford
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