Celia Fremlin > Quotes

“They give her tractors and things to play with instead of dolls, just to prove that girls are exactly the same as boys.
Mind you, they're a bit illogical, it seems to me, because they have never forced me to play with dolls, which I would have thought would have proved the point just as effectively.”
― Celia Fremlin, Listening in the Dusk

“Love isn't relevant once things are really bad. They say love makes the world go round-but it doesn't, you know. Love is a luxury, and you indulge in it when things are OK. As soon as they are bad-really bad-there just isn't a place for it anymore-no place where there could be room for it”
― Celia Fremlin, Listening in the Dusk

“A man’s character, she reflected with surprise, consists a good deal more of the way people feel and behave towards him than of the way he himself feels and behaves.”
― Celia Fremlin, The Trouble Makers

“The beautiful, the inessential, must be given priority if it was to exist at all.”
― Celia Fremlin, The Trouble Makers

“If you went on neglecting your own tastes like this, did you, in the end, cease to have any tastes? Cease, in fact, to be a person at all, and become merely a labour-saving gadget around the house?”
― Celia Fremlin, The Hours Before Dawn

“It was high time Ivor got moving. It wasn’t fair to be dead and yet to hang around like this, in every room, in every corner of the house….There ought to be something like a fly-spray, a fly-spray for ghosts, a ghost-spray….”
― Celia Fremlin, The Long Shadow

“I’d give anything – anything – for a night’s sleep.”
― Celia Fremlin, The Hours Before Dawn

“In these days there are few sights more terrifying than that of a well-dressed man with a notebook looking at a piece of land.”
― Celia Fremlin, Prisoner's Base

“Quarrelling could do more damage to the appearance of a house than a party for fifty people, all drunk.”
― Celia Fremlin, The Trouble Makers

“Man can’t live by truth alone, you know, and children even less so.”
― Celia Fremlin, The Trouble Makers

“What a pity men didn’t gossip about their wives the way women did about their husbands, then they would soon learn that their own wife wasn’t the only one with shortcomings….”
― Celia Fremlin, The Trouble Makers