Norah Lofts > Quotes

“Alongside the practical thought something else struggled and, like an escaped butterfly, took wing: the assurance of something wonderful awaiting her. Just around the corner......”
― Norah Lofts

“Perhaps I am the only person who, asked whether she were a witch or not, could truthfully say, "I do not know. I do know some very strange things have happened to me, or through me."

Lady Alice Rowhedge”
― Norah Lofts, Bless This House

“Don't worry about it, Borage. I've always been inclined to think that the Apostle Paul was similarly afflicted. He speaks often of a bodily weakness, and men have been at pains to name it, attibuting to him everything from lameness to lung sickness. But I think the clue lies in his experience on the road to Damascus. Tell me, do you see a great light?
Dr. Trudgett”
― Norah Lofts, Bless This House

“Simple people always reduce everything to their own simple measure.”
― Norah Lofts, The Concubine

“Only people of low birth pressed questions likely to embarrass.”
― Norah Lofts, The Concubine

“They set off through the soft lingering light. One cuckoo in the depths of Layer Wood and one in the dense shrubbery of the Dower House were keeping up their eternal question and answer, and in the comparative coolness which had come with the evening all the scents of summer had magnified.”
― Norah Lofts, Afternoon of an Autocrat

“...he hadn't wanted to go through life heartsick for something he could not have.”
― Norah Lofts, The Concubine

“He has shamed me, and he'll kill me, but he shan't humble me.”
― Norah Lofts, The Concubine

“I am trying now to be entirely honest. I did actually comfort in the thought that the Devil had, on Strawless Common, defeated God. I much preferred that thought to the thought that God hadn't cared, hadn't helped Robin. I thought all the way back to the story of Eden. God, all-loving, all-wise, had surely wanted people to be happy and healthy and good; it was the Devil who spoiled it all...and since so many people were miserable and sickly and bad the Devil must indeed by very powerful. The lifeless, voiceless thing, lately a singing boy, which they had cut down and put under a sack in the barn to await an unhallowed cross-road grave seemed to me to prove the power of the Devil."

Lady Alice Rowhedge”
― Norah Lofts, Bless This House

“When you read you must get out of your own skin and into the skin of the people you are reading about, that is the only way to enjoy i”
― Norah Lofts, The Town House

“Noli me tangere; for Caesar's I am.”
― Norah Lofts, The Concubine

“There lies the whole crux of the matter; what cannot be prevented must be borne”
― Norah Lofts, The Town House

“...as the old proverb said, The falling out of faithful friends is the renewal of love.”
― Norah Lofts, The Concubine

“Suddenly Damask found herself staring down at the flowers through a dazzle of tears. The words sounded so innocent and so disarming - she remembered that she hadn't wanted to come through the beautiful woods at all; and there was no danger, nothing wrong except the wickedness of her own heart. She looked at Danny's big, brown, work-scarred hands gently gathering the flowers and her love for him was a physical pain. Oh, how she loved him; how she wished that he would ask her to marry him!”
― Norah Lofts, Afternoon of an Autocrat

“Better, I thought, never to have been born than this; brought out of nothingness, to labour and strive and back into nothingness again; a bit of fungus on the surface of a splinter of a dying star.”
― Norah Lofts, Gad's Hall

“suddenly enlightenment, blinding and dazing as the light which smote Saul on the road to Damascus, burst upon her. Negation and disbelief would never cure the sickness of this world. You could never defeat evil by retreating from it. It must be faced and fought and overcome. Action, not futile sorrow, was what was needed.”
― Norah Lofts, Michael And All Angels

“When wine is in, truth is out, you know.”
― Norah Lofts, Hester Roon

“knowing”
― Norah Lofts, How Far to Bethlehem?

“Time, thus unbroken by things to look forward to or back on, stretched endlessly.”
― Norah Lofts, Bless This House

“It was not the first time - it was far from the first time - that Damask had suspected that there was something queer, something quite out of the ordinary about her mind. Most people had minds which dealt with one thought, and then another, one at a time. Hers very often dealt with two, even three, all at the same time.”
― Norah Lofts, Afternoon of an Autocrat

“Thoughts walk in uninvited”
― Norah Lofts, The Town House

“...by God he has the right sow by the ear.”
― Norah Lofts, The Concubine

“Hard work never killed anybody!" Sometimes when Aunt Hester droned on about it I used to think to myself, Maybe not, but hearing about it is killing me! Of course I daren't say it, and of course nobody ever did die of boredom or great-aunt Hester would have been knee-deep in corpses.”
― Norah Lofts, Bless This House

“You carry your own ability to be happy, or the lack of it, wherever you are.”
― Norah Lofts, Hester Roon

“Once more the mystery was performed. The tiny fleshly tabernacle was completed and separated; and from some place afar off the visitant soul which had been awaiting its earthly dwelling moved in and took possession.”
― Norah Lofts, Michael And All Angels

“palms and blackened”
― Norah Lofts, The Town House

“I suppose that if one is ever to have boundless enthusiasm and endless energy one has them at seventeen, eighteen.”
― Norah Lofts, Bless This House

“Dame”
― Norah Lofts, The Town House