Nancy Mitford > Quotes

“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

“I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.”
― Nancy Mitford

“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, Christmas Pudding

“Life is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake, and here is one of them.”
― Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love

“The trouble is that people seem to expect happiness in life. I can't imagine why; but they do. They are unhappy before they marry, and they imagine to themselves that the reason of their unhappiness will be removed when they are married. When it isn't they blame the other person, which is clearly absurd. I believe that is what generally starts the trouble.”
― Nancy Mitford, Christmas Pudding

“Twice in her life she had mistaken something else for it; it was like seeing somebody in the street who you think is a friend, you whistle and wave and run after him, and it is not only not the friend, but not even very like him. A few minutes later the real friend appears in view, and then you can't imagine how you ever mistook that other person for him. Linda was now looking upon the authentic face of love, and she knew it, but it frightened her. That it should come so casually, so much by a series of accidents, was frightening.”
― Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate

“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, The Pursuit of Love

“Sun, silence, and happiness.”
― Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love

“She was filled with a strange, wild, unfamiliar happiness, and knew that this was love. Twice in her life she had mistaken something else for it; it was like seeing somebody in the street who you think is a friend, you whistle and wave and run after him, but it is not only not the friend, but not even very like him. A few minutes later the real friend appears in view, and then you can’t imagine how you ever mistook that other person for him.”
― Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love

“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, The Pursuit of Love

“Life itself, she thought, as she went upstairs to dress for dinner, was stranger than dreams and far, far more disordered.”
― Nancy Mitford, Christmas Pudding

“To fall in love you have to be in the state of mind for it to take, like a disease.”
― Nancy Mitford

“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, Love in a Cold Climate and Other Novels

“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, The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate

“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, The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate

“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, The Pursuit of Love

“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, The Pursuit of Love

“I have often noticed that when women look at themselves in every reflection, and take furtive peeps into their looking-glasses, it is hardly ever, as is generally supposed, from vanity, but much more often from a feeling that all is not quite as it should be”
― Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love

“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, Christmas Pudding

“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, The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate

“It was furnished neither in good taste nor in bad taste, but simply with no attempt at taste at all...”
― Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love

“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, The Pursuit of Love

“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, The Pursuit of Love

“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, The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate

“I am sometimes bored by people, but never by life.”
― Nancy Mitford, The Blessing

“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, Madame de Pompadour

“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, The Pursuit of Love

“The Radletts were always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair; their emotions were on no ordinary plane, they loved or they loathed, they laughed or they cried, they lived in a world of superlatives.”
― Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love

“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, The Pursuit of Love

“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, Christmas Pudding