Rachel Ferguson > Quotes

“A woman at one of mother's parties once said to me, "Do you like reading?" which smote us all to silence, for how could one tell her that books are like having a bath or sleeping, or eating bread - absolute necessities which one never thinks of in terms of appreciation. And we all sat waiting for her to say that she had so little time for reading, before ruling her right out for ever and ever.”
― Rachel Ferguson, The Brontës Went to Woolworths

“I often think that perhaps there is only a limited amount of memory going about the world, and that when it wants to live again, it steals its nest, like a cuckoo.”
― Rachel Ferguson, The Brontes Went to Woolworths

“Running away from love is never any good at all, to our sort. It only deepens the feeling, and it’s better to stay and wear it down.”
― Rachel Ferguson

“I never knew what an extraordinary thing it could be to write a book. In the first place, the characters take the bit between their jaws and canter off with you into places you don't want and never catered for. I had smugly intended my book to be about a family rather like ours, but, lud love you! it's already turned into an account of a barmaid's career in an Edgware Road pub, and I can't squeeze us in anywhere!

Odd things happen, too. I had called my pub, 'The Three Feathers,' and counted on there being heaps of pubs in Edgware Road, not called that, but looking a bit like my description. Before we left home, I went down Edgware Road to investigate, and found my pub, even down to the old-fashioned phonograph on the table in the upstairs sitting-room. And I thought, 'I built that place.”
― Rachel Ferguson, The Brontës Went to Woolworths

“A woman at one of mother's parties once said to me, "Do you like reading?" which smote us all to silence, for how could one tell her that books are like having a bath or sleeping, or eating bread - absolute necessities which one never things of in terms of appreciation. And we all sat waiting for her to say that she had so little time for reading, before ruling her right out for ever and ever.”
― Rachel Ferguson, The Brontës Went to Woolworths

“So many of the best things in life ultimately come to one through preliminaries utterly insignificant. The rule of the game seems to be that you must be unaware. If you enter it in a state of expectancy, with hope or dream or plan, it will not come to pass.”
― Rachel Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square

“Everyone has these rooms if they’d only realize it. And the most important thing is to find out what a room’s trouble is. Usually, it is simply neglect, physical or social.”
― Rachel Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square

“James and I chose Lalage to watch for Lady Vallant’s arrival along the road, because Lalage is plucky and stolid and wouldn’t muff things, and is, of course, the eldest, and poor Lalage turned crimson but trotted to her post all the same.”
― Rachel Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square

“to a child, there is that fulfilment, that sense of endless interest, of ‘something going on’ and all-sufficing that I, for one, have lost for ever.”
― Rachel Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square

“the Seagrave kids’, who, in point of fact, were, at the time of our move, four endlessly lanky young women of up to nineteen years old, with the face that goes with brogue shoes and tweed hats, and about as much bosom as imported rabbits.”
― Rachel Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square

“The relation in detail of one’s dresses and dreams, together with plots of novels and plays one has read and seen should be made a penal offence, except perhaps to Mr. Henry James, to whom I would give the floor for a nightmare.”
― Rachel Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square

“And indeed I have often thought that the susceptibilities of furniture and china have never been sufficiently allowed for by families. Even a much-used saucepan must have its dreary little memories when put into the dustbin at last, and as for chairs! Is it inconceivable that, apart from their feeling for their room and their owners, the tree-life persists in them? Have not seeds buried with mummies for two thousand years sprouted under the very eye of the excavator? You cannot live with a thing and use it without humanizing it to a certain extent, and those men who bluffly announce that their pipe is their ‘friend’ have hit upon a truth more subtle than they know; and perhaps those women who (always contemptuously) get called ‘slaves to their household goods and chattels’ are only, in their turn, more unconsciously susceptible to the dormant life in oak, mahogany and walnut?”
― Rachel Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square

“To her, I knew, I had already taken on the quality of a dream. I was merging into the saga, and she, fascinated, bewildered, was watching me fade...”
― Rachel Ferguson, The Brontës Went to Woolworths

“The woman without a background has a thin time, at any age,”
― Rachel Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square

“What father did in his office it never even occurred to us to enquire.”
― Rachel Ferguson, Evenfield

“a gang of female hearties in khaki calling each other by surnames”
― Rachel Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square

“Most people need some sort of illusion to help ’em along … but that knocks one pretty hard, doesn’t it?”
― Rachel Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square

“when we complained of the pigeons’ greed and of the fact that they scared away the thrushes and blackbirds she said that they were very like humans, that their interests were so few that crumbgrabbing was their substitute for shady company-promoting.”
― Rachel Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square

“we were ourselves again, ready to toothcomb the universe.”
― Rachel Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square

“I had gone for the letters at once. The post always intoxicates me; everythin it throws on to the mat is a magic square or oblong which may alter your life.”
― Rachel Ferguson, The Brontës Went to Woolworths

“we, from very liberty and reaction, were tending towards emptiness and eventual disintegration.”
― Rachel Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square

“Father’s death left us very badly off, a fact mother circled round with us for a considerable time – she had her own bearings to get.”
― Rachel Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square

“had to console myself with being Rochester guying the scene on paper. Just as I had begun the first line (‘Oh damn these empty pleasures’) which I thought very strong, a kindly woman came up and asked me my name, and I said ‘Rochester’ – I didn’t mean to be impertinent, but I was getting interested – and what I was writing, and I said ‘A scurrilous lampoon upon the foibles of the age’, which was a line I had memorized from a large Stuart biography, and just then Charles II came a heavy purler on his behind and I hurried up to get a better view, while the woman, moving off, said to her companion, ‘That little Rochester girl’s nurse ought to be spoken to’.”
― Rachel Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square

“Mother was always the pleader for happiness.”
― Rachel Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square

“We were both humming with music, light and well-being, and in these states anything wonderful may be awaiting one.”
― Rachel Ferguson, The Brontës Went to Woolworths

“not one parent in a hundred realizes the premature pangs endured by thirteen, fourteen and fifteen. It gets called Outgrowing Their Strength and anaemia and The Awkward Age, but is usually an actor or a schoolmistress, and the fact that these untested devotions are laughable and essentially insatiable doesn’t detract from their pathos, or from the tolls they take.”
― Rachel Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square

“his illness had done this much, in wiping out his old scrupulousness; it was, I imagine, one of the many intimately personal castings-off which heaven alone knew how many other men on active service were practising.”
― Rachel Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square

“I, too, have been bored to whimpering stage by others with reminiscent fish to fry, and oh! how they fry it! and with what exclamations and sizzling!”
― Rachel Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square

“In any case women are tougher, more adaptable, than men.”
― Rachel Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square

“I’m really quite efficient you know’. He shook his head over me. ‘Too much conscience. You must find yourself very difficult to live with”
― Rachel Ferguson, A Harp in Lowndes Square