Jane Gardam > Quotes

“If you've not been loved as a child, you don't know how to love a child.”
― Jane Gardam, Old Filth

“What I don't want is to be called an octogenarian. I saw 'Octogenarian Jane Gardam' and I thought 'Blow me!' I mean, I am, but that's not the point."

(Inteview, The Guardian, 8 January 2011)”
― Jane Gardam

“The astounding thing about Paula is that she looks like Tess of the D´Urbervilles, and she sounds like Tess of the D´Urbervilles, and she thinks like Tess of the D´Urbervilles and yet she is so different from Tess of the D´Urbervilles. I expect she comes from a different part of Dorset.”
― Jane Gardam, Bilgewater

“But there's time yet. The old women of the tribe have almost always been the wiser. If they keep their marbles long enough. Old men forget--or tend to reminisce, and reminisce falsely and sententiously as a rule. We are often very silly in our middle years but we tend to improve”
― Jane Gardam, The Queen of the Tambourine

“Present us with a silver cup for something when you're a filthy rich lawyer, I dare say? Yes. You'll be a lawyer. Magnificent memory. Sense of logic, no imagination and no brains.”
― Jane Gardam, Old Filth

“For years of our lives the days pass waywardly, featureless, without meaning, without particular happiness or unhappiness. Then, like turning over a tapestry when you have only known the back of it, there is spread the pattern.”
― Jane Gardam, Crusoe's Daughter

“Laywers, I suppose, were children once.”
― Jane Gardam

“All my life I have felt events to be the result of my own sins.”
― Jane Gardam

“She wanted to take his hand. Her hardest task now as she grew older in the Ministry was to deal with her longing to be touched - hugged, stroked by anyone, any human being - a friend, a lover, a child or even (and here she scented danger) a servant. Of either sex. She prayed about it, asking that God's encircling arms would bring comfort. They did not”
― Jane Gardam, Old Filth

“Thank you," he said. "I'm glad you enjoyed it. If there is anyone here this afternoon whom I have convinced that books are meant to be enjoyed, that English is nothing to do with duty, that it has nothing to do with school - with exercises and homework and ticks and crosses - then I am a happy man." He turned away but then he turned back again and he suddenly simply shouted, he bellowed "To hell with school," he cried. "To hell with school. English is what matters. ENGLISH IS LIFE." The Head grabbed him and led him off to her sitting-room for tea, not looking too thrilled, and we were let out and I went flying home.”
― Jane Gardam, A Long Way from Verona

“I was quite enchanted with myself. I had always thought I had very strong views on sexual morality. I found I had nothing of the kind.”
― Jane Gardam, Bilgewater

“Judges live with shadows behind them.”
― Jane Gardam, Old Filth

“He has not the faintest idea that I am ugly and we are very happy together.”
― Jane Gardam, Bilgewater

“monsters”
― Jane Gardam, The Man in the Wooden Hat

“If you lose your memory you can experience things again as if they were new, like when you were young.”
― Jane Gardam, The Stories of Jane Gardam

“Yes. You’ll be a lawyer. Magnificent memory. Sense of logic, no imagination and no brains. My favourite chap, Teddy Feathers, as a matter of fact.”
― Jane Gardam, Old Filth

“Jei vaikystėje tavęs nemylėjo, tu nemokėsi mylėti vaiko. Meilę reikia patirti anksčiau. Gali įskaudinti iš nežinojimo.”
― Jane Gardam, Old Filth

“Memory changed for both Edward and Elisabeth. There were fewer people now to keep it alive.”
― Jane Gardam, The Man in the Wooden Hat

“Kai tik atsiranda merginų, egzaminų pažymiai ima blogėti. Kuo karštesnė aistra, tuo prasčiau sekasi mokslas.”
― Jane Gardam, Old Filth

“The Titans were gone. They had clashed their last.”
― Jane Gardam, Last Friends

“He was very lean and narrow. As a piece of construction he was not excellent but there was a sort of attraction about him.”
― Jane Gardam, The Summer After the Funeral

“The idea that mothers and daughters can say everything to each other is a myth.”
― Jane Gardam, Last Friends

“It’s—I’m sorry, Eliza—it’s the way you make a fool of yourself now. He says that you have crumbled. Nobody now would dream you had been to a university. Your prudence did not develop. Say what you like about equality of mind, prudence is usually a male attribute, especially in the Civil Service where of course there are still very few women, as we know. Making judgments is a female failing, justified by the dangerous word ‘instinct.”
― Jane Gardam, The Queen of the Tambourine

“His colleagues at the Bar called him Filth, but not out of irony. It was because he was considered to be the source of the old joke, Failed In London Try Hong Kong. It was said that he had fled the London Bar, very young, very poor, on a sudden whim just after the War, and had done magnificently well in Hong Kong from the start. Being a modest man, they said, he had called himself a parvenu, a fraud, a carefree spirit.
Filth in fact was no great maker of jokes, was not at all modest about his work and seldom, except in great extremity, went in for whims. He was loved, however, admired, laughed at kindly and still much discussed many years after retirement.”
― Jane Gardam, Old Filth

“I was seeing something I didn’t understand and did not want to.

No I wasn’t. I was seeing something I had always understood and wanted to understand better.”
― Jane Gardam, Bilgewater

“The landing stage stood on its high crooked stilts with only one person watching the boat disappear round the bend of the river—a girl of twelve called Ada, the wet-nurse’s eldest child. As”
― Jane Gardam, Old Filth

“A parhelion. A formidable and ancient omen of something”
― Jane Gardam, Old Filth

“But it’s true, she thought, nobody really knows a thing about another’s past. Why should we? Different worlds we all inhabit from the womb.”
― Jane Gardam, Last Friends

“Herman glowered, saying that clearly only Americans were historians now. ‘They have so little of it to learn,’ said Dulcie.”
― Jane Gardam, Last Friends

“each side of the saddle, all in wickerwork but”
― Jane Gardam, Last Friends