Monica Dickens > Quotes

“Nursing is a kind of mania; a fever in the blood; an incurable disease which, once contracted, cannot be got out of the system. If it was not like that, there would be no hospital nurses, for compared dispassionately with other professions, the hours are long, the work hard, and the pay inadequate to the amount of concentrated energy required.
A nurse, however, does not view her profession dispassionately. It is too much a part of her.”
― Monica Dickens

“Writing is a cop-out. An excuse to live perpetually in fantasy land, where you can create, direct and watch the products of your own head. Very selfish.”
― Monica Dickens

“Nothing that ever happens in life can take away the fact that I am me. So I have to go on being me.”
― Monica Dickens, Mariana

“But Mariana was wrong. You couldn't die. You had to go on. When you were born, you were given a trust of individuality that you were bound to preserve. It was precious. The things that happened in your life, however closely connected with other people, developed and strengthened that individuality. You became a person.”
― Monica Dickens, Mariana

“When I can't ride anymore, I shall keep horses as long as I can hobble around with a bucket and a wheelbarrow. When I can't hobble, I shall roll my wheelchair out to the fence of the field where my horses graze and watch them.
Whether by wheelbarrow or wheelchair, I will do likewise to keep alive-as long as I can do as best I can-my connection with horses.”
― Monica Dickens, Talking of Horses

“However, now she was a schoolgirl no longer. She had discovered how to manage her hair, had been to one or two parties and a night club, and laid on lipstick with the idea that each layer was a layer of sophistication.”
― Monica Dickens, Mariana

“Now that it was safe to drag their relationship out into the light and examine it mercilessly it was fantastic on what a thin basis they had proposed to build their life. Apart from physical attraction, there was nothing between them but fun and parties, and that was not entirely a taste in common.
Life was like a jigsaw, but if you tried to fit the pieces together yourself, you generally got them wrong.”
― Monica Dickens, Mariana

“The lovely effects of champagne were quite gone and only the nasty ones were left; the taste in the mouth, the splitting ache in the brow and the impotence of not being able to clarify one's thoughts.”
― Monica Dickens, Mariana

“What else happened?' she asked, not because she was particularly interested, but because one must talk to one's mother when she came to visit one, however tired and dispirited one felt.”
― Monica Dickens, Mariana

“A decision loses its charm unless you can act on it immediately.”
― Monica Dickens, One Pair of Feet

“People were kind and friendly and amusing, but they thought that companionship and conversation were synonymous, and some of them had voices that jarred in your head. There was a lot to be said for dogs. They understood without telling you so, and they were always pleasing to look at, awake or asleep, like Bingo. He slept now, with little whistling snores, in his basket at the side of the fire, his stubby legs and one whiskery eyebrow twitching to the fitful tempo of his dreams.”
― Monica Dickens

“While they were dancing, the buoyancy that the champagne had given her left her all at once, and she slumped and felt suddenly tired and miserable about all the things that Denys should have said and done and hadn't. At the end of the dance there was one awful moment when she was bored. She didn't want to go and be kissed in the garden, she didn't want to drink any more, and Denys was in no mood for conversation; what was there to do? She was bored. It was a terrible, treacherous thought to feel like that when you were with someone you loved.”
― Monica Dickens, Mariana

“It was with a shock of pitying surprise that she realized, in later years, that the grown-ups had missed the paradise which the children found so easily.”
― Monica Dickens, Mariana

“Christine had wanted to continue the conversation where she was, with the unappetising tray of dressings balanced on her hip. The most interesting things never cropped up when you were sitting comfortably in chairs. It was always in transient places like halls or staircases or bathroom doorways that the really important things started to be said and you had to discuss them then and there, because the mood was lost if you moved away to a more suitable place.”
― Monica Dickens, No More Meadows

“Beyond the room, the night was lashing itself to an impotent fury of wind and rain. Mary thought how strange it was to think that only a few inches of wall separated the placid cosiness of the sitting-room from the howling, streaming darkness. Houses were very defiant things.”
― Monica Dickens, Mariana

“That often happens when you plan a story to tell someone, because while you are planning it you write all the dialogue yourself – theirs as well as yours – and then, of course, they don’t know their part.”
― Monica Dickens, No More Meadows

“Mary could be as sullen or rebellious as anyone on occasion, but she never achieved the glorious abandon with which Angela simply went her own way, uncaring.”
― Monica Dickens, Mariana

“She did not get a medal - it was not fair. 'What a swizz,' she whispered bitterly to her mother as Cicely Barnard's name was called. 'She simply doesn't know enough to be bad.”
― Monica Dickens, Mariana

“When people are drunk the first time you meet them, you are inclined to think of them as permanent dipsomaniacs”
― Monica Dickens, No More Meadows

“She had not told her mother about Denys, but she had a suspicion that Mrs. Shannon knew all about it nevertheless. It was unlike her not to want to satisfy her curiosity when she came upon her daughter sobbing in various parts of the house. She had asked no questions; she had simply donned the role of the heavily understanding mother, and had done a lot of shoulder-patting and given Mary an expensive evening dress from the shop. Mary had no idea how she knew, but was certain that if she had not known she would never have rested until she did.”
― Monica Dickens, Mariana

“fifty, ambitiously but unsuccessfully dressed in a black satin”
― Monica Dickens, One Pair of Hands: From Upstairs to Downstairs, in this charming 1930s memoir

“Life was like a jigsaw, but if you tried to fit the pieces together yourself, you generally got them wrong. Pierre had money; she needed money. Pierre was lovable and loved her; she would marry him. She had thought that was the pattern the pieces made. But it had been like trying to force two pieces together that didn't fit, and then, suddenly, the jigsaw had been done, in quite a different way, by other hands.”
― Monica Dickens

“Doris was getting No. 4 ready for a new guest. The floor did not trouble her much, but she spent quite a long time on the taps and the veneered top of the dressing-table. Dusting and polishing she liked—things that showed—but those bits of fluff and dried mud at the bottom of the wardrobe she just pushed back into a corner. There was no means of getting them out, anyway, with that ridge at the front. Furniture was always made as inconvenient as possible. Doris was used to that.”
― Monica Dickens, Flowers on the Grass

“I’m in charge here,’ she cried. ‘You can’t come breaking into the ward like this. Who do you want to see? You can’t see them now.’ I thought of bursting into tears and saying: ‘I’ve come to see me Mum,’ but as I looked up at her, my eye was caught by the fantastic equine length of her false teeth and I could think of nothing else. I stared.”
― Monica Dickens, One Pair of Feet

“Even the foreseen loss of your parents at a normal age brings shocks you have not bargained for. One is that you must finally face the fact that you are grown up. While they are alive, you can be their child, even in middle age. They stand between you and death. With both of them gone, you are next in line.
But that is nothing compared to the unexpected gap, the vast space, not a desert or emptiness, because a desert has substance, and emptiness implies containment. An infinite nothing.”
― Monica Dickens, An Open Book

“Mr Ripley, Fanny Adams and I fought all night for that baby. At about two o’clock, when it definitely decided to live, the mother decided to die. We thwarted her, however, and in the morning there they were, grey and unsubstantial both of them, but definitely there and likely to stay.”
― Monica Dickens, One Pair of Feet

“I got mixed up and gave Gastric a leg of turkey and three roast potatoes, but it didn’t seem to do him any harm, and he was very difficult afterwards about his normal diet of flaked fish and puree.”
― Monica Dickens, One Pair of Feet

“Fanny Adams was the Senior Night Sister, a nut-coloured raw-boned woman, who prowled around the hospital on silent feet, with a venomous fang for a tongue… She was very tall and looked, in her uniform, like an iron column, because she had no ins and outs and her apron did not stick out like other people’s, but hung rigidly tubular.”
― Monica Dickens, One Pair of Feet

“I had half a feeling that he might suddenly savage me in a bear hug under glass arcade. When he was disgruntled, you never knew how he would vent it.”
― Monica Dickens, My Turn to Make the Tea

“In ‘The Ethics of Nursing’, I learned that one should never sit in the presence of superiors and that conversation with them should be limited to essentials, personal matters and opinions being kept in the background. I wondered, en passant, what I would do if Sarah P. offered me a chair, leaned her deep bosom confidingly on the desk and said: ‘Now, tell me all about yourself!”
― Monica Dickens, One Pair of Feet