Enid Bagnold > Quotes

“I don't like people," said Velvet. "... I only like horses.”
― Enid Bagnold, National Velvet

“Who wants to become a writer? And why? ... It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower of life, even if it's a cactus.”
― Enid Bagnold

“If I had my life over again[, ] I'd have thought more about words. And thought about them earlier.”
― Enid Bagnold, The Loved and Envied

“It was March. The days of March creeping gustily on like something that man couldn't hinder and God wouldn't hurry.”
― Enid Bagnold, National Velvet

“You always was a nice chap," said Mrs. Brown. "On'y I'm so buried under me fat I feel half ashamed to tell you so. Love don't seem dainty on a fat woman. Nothin's going to break up this home not even if you lose yer head, but it'll make it easier if you keep it. On'y leave that child to me. She's got more to come. You think the Grand National's the end of all things, but a child that can do that can do more when she's grown. On'y keep her level, keep her going quiet. We'll live this down presently an' you'll see”
― Enid Bagnold, National Velvet

“A landscape glittered behind her voice. There were icicles in it and savage fields of ice, great storms boiling over a flat countryside striped with white rails - a chessboard beneath a storm. Horses were stretched forever at the gallop. Tiny men in silk were brave beyond bearing and sat on the horses like embryos with their knees in their mouths. The gorgeous names of horses were cried from mouth to mouth and circulated in a steam of fame. Lottery, The Hermit, the great mare Sceptre; the glorious ancestress Pocahontas, whose blood ran down like time into her flying children; Easter Hero, the Lamb, that pony stallion.”
― Enid Bagnold, National Velvet

“The children seemed to cast their Precursors like shadows about the house, sometimes tangibly, in the sound of a voice, sometimes by suggestion, because it was striking the hour for their return from a walk, sometimes mysteriously, because inside the shell of their mother's head the children were painted like angels on the roof of a chapel.”
― Enid Bagnold, The Squire

“She'd ride like a piece of lightning. No more weight'n a piece of lightning.”
― Enid Bagnold, National Velvet

“She saw herself alone, alive and doomed, strong and helpless, passing in a line of women, her mother before her, the child Lucy, behind, women walking on a temple frieze, Greek women in fluttering robes rounding a vase's girth for ever.”
― Enid Bagnold, The Squire

“I know I feel like Gulliver sometimes, weighed down by little men. There are so many people in this house, I'm a queen bee, with every muscle dragging. I'm the heart of a cluster, black, dripping, sucking, hanging.”
― Enid Bagnold, The Squire

“She changed her position, contemplated a row od apple shrubs that she had put in last autumn at the bottom of the terrace, and slowly filled up again with comfortable thoughts. Things wee coming to a head. Her inner life, her restless inner life, was still and lay asleep. She was at liberty now to think of material things; positions of wardrobes and chests-of-drawers; lists of books to be piled by her bed; dressing jackets; white wooly vests and pants. It was not often she could thus play dolls and doll-houses without feeling she ought to be doing something else; that life was short; that she was threatened by the melancholy of life itself whose vapors sometimes reached her with overpowering strength. from her present sea-deep content two things were absent now - the horror of the ultimate departure, and the need to express herself before the end. The baby seemed to swim and strike like a dolphin. "it is a mystery," she said. "Women bearing children, bulbs becoming hyacinths, acorns … sheep… lambs. Feet that never touched the earth… I shall become two people." She stared between the apple trees; hypnotized, drugged by that sea-deep peace; wonder drifting weedily in and out. She was a vase, a container, a plot oak for a gnome to live in, a split oak, a hollow elm.”
― Enid Bagnold

“What shall you do?"
“I shall continue to explore—the astonishment of living!”
― Enid Bagnold

“By seven o'clock even the long corridor was as dim as the alley outside. No one thought of shutting the windows - I doubt whether they will shut...and the fog rolled over the sill in banks and round the open glass doors, till even the white cap of a Sister could hardly be seen as she passed.”
― Enid Bagnold, A Diary Without Dates

“If it upsets you better not recall it.”
― Enid Bagnold, The Chalk Garden

“If it upsets you better not recall it.” --The Chalk Garden, a play by Enid Bagnold, 1953/1956”
― Enid Bagnold, The Chalk Garden

“The dangerous thing about hate is that it seems so reasonable.”
― Enid Bagnold

“In a strange way', she thought, 'these absences suit my nature though not my heart. I love him, I miss him, but I have time to put on my humanity again.”
― Enid Bagnold, The Squire

“Can you understand when I tell you that you owe me nothing? That to have a child is an account which is settled on the spot”
― Enid Bagnold, The Squire

“At midnight when the fire had burnt down, and leaving the door wide open that she might have the lights behind her, she went through the dark hall, drew back the bolts of the front door and took her letters to the post.
The village green outside was white with moonlight. As she stepped on to it it seemed a deck, her village ship a-sail on the slant of the world. The unknown and impersonal companion within her turned with a gulp, emitted a bubble of wind and revolved in its pond.
"Do you never sleep?" she enquired aloud of her belly. The hemispheres whirled above the stillness, stars shone; down at human level the lamp in the churchyard gate was still as a star.”
― Enid Bagnold, The Squire

“If it upsets you better not recall it.” --from The Chalk Garden”
― Enid Bagnold

“That is why a garden is a good lesson….so much dies in it. And so often.”
― Enid Bagnold

“Sixty-five trays. It takes an hour to do. Thirteen pieces on each tray. Thirteen times sixty-five...eight hundred and forty-five things to collect, lay, square up symmetrically. I make little absurd reflections and arrangements - taking a dislike to the knives because they will not lie still on the polished metal of the tray, but pivot on their shafts, and swing out at angles after my fingers have left them.
I love the long, the dim and lonely, corridor; the light centred in the gleam of the trays, salt-cellars, yellow butters, cylinders of glass...”
― Enid Bagnold, A Diary Without Dates

“Far down the corridor a slim figure in white approaches, dwarfed by the smoky distance; her nun-like cap floating, her scarlet cape, the "cape of pride," slipped round her narrow shoulders.
How intent and silent They are!
I watched this one pass with a look half reverence, half envy. One should never aspire to know a Sister intimately. They are disappointing people; without candour, without imagination. Yet what a look of personality hangs about them....”
― Enid Bagnold, A Diary Without Dates

“But now, at the table, behind the fall of the tablecloth, behind the sheath of skin, hanging head downwards between cliffs of bone, was the baby, its arms all but clasped about its neck, its face aslant upon its arms, hair painted upon its skull, closed, secret eyes, a diver poised in albumen, ancient and epic, shot with delicate spasms, as old as Pharaoh in its tomb.”
― Enid Bagnold, The Squire

“They went together to the pond. The frogs, frozen by the movement, sat still. Fourteen golden eyes like nuggets gleamed unwinking from the margin. Some squatted on dead reeds and immersed branches. Tranced by the half-apprehended movement above them they relied for safety upon immobility. Some hung by one slim hand like children to a raft. All had been stricken to stone by the human appearance. Only the sun, shifting in the sky, tickled the fire in the nuggets in their green heads.”
― Enid Bagnold, The Squire

“I have said before that the long corridor is wonderful. In the winter afternoons and evenings, when the mist rolled up and down over the tiles like the smoke in a tunnel, when one walked almost in darkness and peered into the then forbidden wards, when dwarfs coming from the G block grew larger and larger until the A block turned them into beings of one's own size, the corridor always made a special impression on me.”
― Enid Bagnold, A Diary Without Dates

“There is nothing so difficult to remember as sexual love. How often, where, and what happened? It all goes, it has all gone, leaving no impression, mattering so much less than we like to think. (…)
What we have had we have had, and, pleased, we pass along. (But what we haven't had may well be a ticklish business!)”
― Enid Bagnold, The Squire

“A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again.”
― Enid Bagnold

“Sometimes in the late evenings one walks busily up and down the ward doing this and that, forgetting that there is anything beyond the drawn blinds, engrossed in the patients, one's tasks - bed-making, washing, one errand and another - and then suddenly a blind will blow out and almost up to the ceiling, and through it you will catch a glimpse that makes you gasp, of a black night crossed with bladed searchlights, of a moon behind a crooked tree.
The lifting of the blind is a miracle; I do not believe in the wind.”
― Enid Bagnold, A Diary Without Dates

“What shall you do?”
“I shall continue to explore—the astonishment of living!” --from The Chalk Garden”
― Enid Bagnold