Alice Thomas Ellis > Quotes

“There is no reciprocity. Men love women. Women love children. Children love hamsters. Hamsters don't love anyone; it is quite hopeless.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis

“Adolescence is usually typified by an unanswerable combination of innocence and insolence.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, The Summerhouse Trilogy

“Well, I think adultery is a filthy habit,' said Rose, 'like using someone else's toothbrush.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, The Sin Eater

“. . to cook well and with imagination you have to be in a cheerful and contented frame of mind, and thus inclined to be generous.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, The Inn at the Edge of the World

“All his beauty, wit and grace
Lie forever in one place,
He who sang and sprang and moved
Now, in death, is only loved.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, The Birds of the Air

“هيچ رابطه متقابلی وجود ندارد. مردها زن‌ها را دوست دارند؛ زن‌ها بچه‌ها را، بچه‌ها همسترها را”
― Alice Thomas Ellis

“This perhaps is what is meant by hiraeth: a lifelong yearning for what is gona and out of reach.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, A Welsh Childhood

“It was probable, I thought, that what I disliked in him was what Nour had disliked in me, and that the whole world was mad.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, The Summer House: A Trilogy

“When the children were very small I spent weeks alone with them high up in the Welsh hills and I used to lose the power of speech. I would return to London bereft of all vocabulary, communicating in grunts and diddums talk. You feel a fool asking, for instance, Professor Sir Alfred Ayer if he would care for an icky bitty more soup in his ickle bowl.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, Home Life One

“This is a worrying recipe. Young bears (cubs will need about two and a half hours of cooking) might well still be attended by their mothers, who are notoriously irritable when anything threatens their offspring. Choose, rather, an old friendless bear and double the cooking time.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, Fish, Flesh And Good Red Herring

“Men were made for war. Without it they wandered greyly about, getting under the feet of the women, who were trying to organize the really important things of life. When they couldn't make war men made money - and trouble and a dreadful nuisance of themselves.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, The Sin Eater

“The paintings seemed to bear the same relation to reality as prayers to the vision of God.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, The Summer House: A Trilogy

“When a baronet is discovered behind a bush in the park with a guardsman, or a minister of the crown is caught creeping out of a country with his socks stuffed full of bank notes and a woman not his wife ten paces behind, or a public person is revealed disporting himself with a couple of tarts and a teddy bear in West Paddington, they complain to the press that the outcry is hypocritical and that everyone would like to do what they were doing if only they had the chance. They regard the law as an instrument of envy, like nationalization and death duties.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, The Sin Eater

“There is no relationship. Women, like men, women, children, babies hamsters.

This is the Google Translate of the quote in Persian, above.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis

“Scarlet, when aware that she was consciously asking her friend for advice and support, felt guilty, for she had come to believe that advice and support were commodities for which you paid professionals, rather as you paid prostitutes for love and bought your vegetables instead of growing them yourself.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, Pillars of Gold

“I vividly recall an occasion when the oldest son was starting to crawl. We were sitting in a garden in the country with acres of velvet lawn and I picked him up and ran with him, dropped him on the touch line and flew back to sip a drink in comparative peace before he could get at me again. He came thundering over the lawn on his hands and knees and peed on Randolph Churchill who had ill-advisedly taken him on to his lap. I can't imagine why. It was a most uncharacteristic gesture - on the part of R. Churchill, I mean, not of the son.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, Home Life One

“I read quickly, flitting and sipping, skipping the boring bits and seizing on the oddities and inconsistencies which are often ignored by the scholars since they interfere with the measured and coherent approach to the matter at hand.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, Fish, Flesh And Good Red Herring

“Anyway,’ he said, snapping the cap decisively onto his fountain pen, ‘let's go and see what's for tea’. He noticed, surprised, that he had been needing to talk to somebody about what he was doing, and Jessica felt the sleepy gratification of a child who has been told a story.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, The Inn at the Edge of the World

“The reappraisal of a historical figure always presents a difficult problem, particularly when his history is comparatively recent, and during the intervening years other people have given their own version of his character and the events of his life -- some of them nearer to him in time than others, and those not infrequently hostile to the principles and ideas which guided him through his span on earth. The heroes of yesterday are often mocked and reviled by the rising generation, who are trying by all means to free themselves from the restraints of the past.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, The Inn at the Edge of the World

“There's someone watching me out there,' he said. 'Out in the sea. They have grey eyes -- grey as the sea. They're looking at me.'

"The owl was a baker's daughter,' said Harry.

"Yes, she was,' said Jon, unsurprised at this disclosure.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, The Inn at the Edge of the World

“Everything looked the same every morning: all in order and just the same. It was in the nights that the difference held sway and there was no comfort for lost and lonely things.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, Fairy Tale

“They shared an image of the American Christmas--riches, reconciliations, tears, snow, success, sentiment, furs and firs, the shop windows shining like Heaven and everything good for sale.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, The Birds of the Air

“Have you noticed my fir?' asked the professor. Jessica emerging from the sparse and anonymous forests of her imaginings, misunderstood him. Fur? Was he speaking of his own body hair? Was he perhaps a werewolf? Or was he drawing attention to some unappreciated mink, ocelot or garment of beaver?

". . . planted it years ago,' he was saying. 'Whipped off the tinsel and the gewgaws, stuck it in the garden and now it's nearly sixty feet tall.'

Ah, though Jessica, reassured - a fir. She could identify Christmas trees.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, The Inn at the Edge of the World

“How the vulgar loved portents, prodigies and the untoward. Only the religious knew how embarrassing they could be - and quite beside the point.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, The 27th Kingdom