Stella Gibbons Quotes

#1. My favorite book of all time is Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons.

Meg Cabot

#2. The cows in Stella Gibbons's immortal 'Cold Comfort Farm' are named Graceless, Aimless, Feckless and Pointless, and that more or less is the verdict on 'Ocean's Kingdom,' the wildly hyped and wildly uninteresting collaboration between Peter Martins and Paul McCartney.

Robert Gottlieb

#3. She glanced upwards for a second at the soft blue vault of the midsummer night sky. Not a cloud misted its solemn depths. Tomorrow would be a beautiful day.

Stella Gibbons

#4. Richard had realized, not that Elfine was beautiful, but that he loved Elfine. (Young men frequently need this fact pointing out to them, as Flora knew by observing the antics of her friends.)

Stella Gibbons

#5. A straight nose is a great help if one wishes to look serious'.

Stella Gibbons

#6. Daisies opened in sly lust to the sun-rays and rain-spears, and eft-flies, locked in a blind embrace, spun radiantly through the glutinous light to their ordained death.

Stella Gibbons

#7. On the whole, Cold Comfort was not without its promise of mystery and excitement.

Stella Gibbons

#8. Well,' said Mrs Smiling, 'it sounds an appalling place, but in a different way from all the others. I mean, it does sound interesting and appalling, while the others just sound appalling.

Stella Gibbons

#9. Is there a rug?' she asked, hanging fire.
'Nay. The sins burnin' in yer marrow will keep yer warm.

Stella Gibbons

#10. It is rather frightening to be able to write so revoltingly, yet so successfully. All these letters are works of art, except, perhaps, the last. They are positively oily.

Stella Gibbons

#11. Curious how Love destroys every vestige of that politeness which the human race, in its years of evolution, has so painfully acquired.

Stella Gibbons

#12. She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple.

Stella Gibbons

#13. Flora had also learned the degraded art of 'tasting' unread books, and now, whenever her skimming eye lit on a phrase about heavy shapes, or sweat, or howls or bedposts, she just put the book back on the shelf, unread.

Stella Gibbons

#14. She could feel magic in the quiet spring day, like a sorcerer's far-off voice, and lines of poetry floated over her mind as if they were strands of spider-web.

Stella Gibbons

#15. The life of a journalist is poor, nasty, brutish, and short. So is his style

Stella Gibbons

#16. Cautious as a camera-man engaged in shooting a family of fourteen lions

Stella Gibbons

#17. And when April like an over-lustful lover leaped upon the lush flanks of the Downs there would be yet another child in the wretched hut down on Nettle Flitch Field, where Meriam housed the fruits of her shame.

Stella Gibbons

#18. To tidy up takes time, and she wants all her time for wolfing books...

Stella Gibbons

#19. Mrs Poste, who had wished people to live beautiful lives and yet be ladies and gentlemen.

Stella Gibbons

#20. The flies buzzed in answer above the dirty water standing in the washbasin, in which floated a solitary black hair. It, too, was like life
and as meaningless.

Stella Gibbons

#21. On the whole, Flora liked it better when they were silent, though it did rather give her the feeling that she was acting in one of the less cheerful German highbrow films.

Stella Gibbons

#22. No one had seen anything of Urk since he had gone galloping out into the night carrying Meriam, the hired girl. It was generally assumed that he had drowned her and then himself. Who cared, anyway?

Stella Gibbons

#23. This may not be much, but it is something. Tomorrow we die; but at least we danced in silver shoes.

Stella Gibbons

#24. You have the most revolting Florence Nightingale complex,' said Mrs. Smiling.
It is not that at all, and well you know it. On the whole, I dislike my fellow beings; I find them so difficult to understand. But I have a tidy mind and untidy lives irritate me. Also, they are uncivilized.

Stella Gibbons

#25. Ah but' 'there'll be no butter in hell!

Stella Gibbons

#26. She sat in a corner warm with sunlight, a copy of Home Notes open unread upon her knee, and watched the green meadows flying past while the business men in the carriage talked about news in the papers - awful, as usual - their golf, their gardeners, and the detective stories they were reading.

Stella Gibbons

#27. Where are you flying off to?' inquired Viola, rather sulkily; few sights are more annoying when we feel lazy than that of somebody bounding upstairs.

Stella Gibbons

#28. He stood at the table facing Flora and blowing heavily on his tea and staring at her. Flora did not mind. It was quite interesting: like having tea with a rhinoceros.

Stella Gibbons

#29. Haven't you enough money?'
For she knew that this is what is the matter with nearly everybody over twenty-five.

Stella Gibbons

#30. The farmhouse itself no longer looked like a beast about to spring. (Not that it ever had, to her, for she was not in the habit of thinking that things looked exactly like other things which were as different from them in appearance as it was possible to be.)

Stella Gibbons

#31. He was, she reflected, almost rudely like a tortoise; and she was glad her friend kept none as pets or they might have suspected mockery.

Stella Gibbons

#32. There are some things (like first love and one's first reviews) at which a woman in her middle years does not care to look too closely.

Stella Gibbons

#33. His young man's limbs, sleek in their dark male pride, seemed to disdain the covering offered them by the brief shorts and striped jersey. His body might have been naked, like his full, muscled throat, which rose, round and proud as the male organ of a flower, from the neck of his sweater.

Stella Gibbons

#34. An interesting survival of mediaeval superstition," commented Flora.

Stella Gibbons

#35. Flora sighed. It was curious that persons who lived what the novelists called a rich emotional life always seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake.

Stella Gibbons

#36. What a pleasant life could be had in this world by a handsome, sensible old lady of good fortune, blessed with a sound constitution and a firm will

Stella Gibbons

#37. Here was an occasion, she thought, for indulging in that deliberate rudeness which only persons with habitually good manners have the right to commit ...

Stella Gibbons

#38. The Abbe's warning: 'Never confront an enemy at the end of a journey, unless it happens to be his journey'.

Stella Gibbons

#39. Nature is all very well in her place, but she must not be allowed to make things untidy.

Stella Gibbons

#40. Hetty was eating, rather than reading, large slabs of a very thin book of contemporary verse each page having a thick wodge of print, without capital letters, starting at the top and running nearly to the bottom. Her eyes were very close to the book and she frowned with concentration.

Stella Gibbons

#41. I saw something nasty in the woodshed.

Stella Gibbons

#42. But Julia thought it would be a much better idea if they went to see Mr Dan Langham in 'On Your Toes!' at the New Hippodrome, so they went there instead and had a nice time instead of a nasty one.

Stella Gibbons

#43. I do not object to the phenomena, but I do object to the parrot.

Stella Gibbons

#44. Flora inherited, however, from her father a strong will and from her mother a slender ankle.

Stella Gibbons

#45. He was enmeshed in his grief. He did not notice that Graceless's leg had come off and that she was managing as best she could with three.

Stella Gibbons

#46. She liked to watch her father as he read, and to listen to the smoothly rolling tones; she felt no curiosity about what the words meant. It was only Shakespeare and she was used to him.

Stella Gibbons

#47. Mary, you know I hate parties. My idea of hell is a very large party in a cold room where everybody has to play hockey properly.

Stella Gibbons

#48. Mrs. Smiling's second interest was her collection of brassieres, and her search for the perfect one. She was reputed to have the largest and finest collection of these garments in the world. It was hoped that on her death it would be left to the nation.

Stella Gibbons

#49. Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm.

Stella Gibbons

#50. ...though it was too true that life as she is lived has a way of being curiously different from life as described by novelists.

Stella Gibbons

#51. Marie Laurencin.

Stella Gibbons

#52. The trouble about Mr Mybug was that ordinary subjects, which are not usually associated with sex even by our best minds, did suggest sex to Mr Mybug, and he pointed them out and made comparisons and asked Flora what she thought about it all.

Stella Gibbons

#53. All the same, I don't mean nothin' you wouldn't like yer mas to know about, see? That's straight, that is. It's Art, and that makes all the difference. *When it ain't Art it's dirt, but if it's Art it's all right, see?*

Stella Gibbons

#54. There have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm

Stella Gibbons

#55. Happiness can never hope to command so much interest as distress.

Stella Gibbons

#56. That would be delightful,' agreed Flora, thinking how nasty and boring it would be.

Stella Gibbons

#57. One of the disadvantages of almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one's favorite writers. It gave one a curious feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one's dressing gown.

Stella Gibbons

#58. But she had a lively acquaintaince with confinement through the works of women novelists, especially those of the unmarried ones.

Stella Gibbons

#59. Women are all alike
aye fussin' over their fal-lals and bedazin' a man's eyes, when all they really want is man's blood and his heart out of his body and his soul and his pride ...

Stella Gibbons

#60. Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as Persuasion but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, 'Collecting material'. No one can object to that.

Stella Gibbons

#61. Tina, finding herself and her husband on a sandbank, so to speak, between two classes, had gone to the artists. The artists do not mind if one is gentry or a common cad so long as one is neither a snob nor a bore

Stella Gibbons

#62. By god, DH Lawrence was right when he said there must be a dumb, dark, dull, bitter belly-tension between a man and a woman, and how else could this be achieved save in the long monotony of marriage?

Stella Gibbons

#63. After another minute Reuben brought forth the following sentence:
"I ha' scranleted two hundred furrows come five o'clock down i' the bute."
It was a difficult remark, Flora felt, to which to reply.

Stella Gibbons

#64. Surely she had endured enough for one evening without having to listen to intelligent conversation?

Stella Gibbons

#65. Like all really strong-minded women, on whom everybody flops, she adored being bossed about. It was so restful.

Stella Gibbons