Sybille Bedford > Quotes

“To remain monolingual reduces the mind to the confines of a tramline.”
― Sybille Bedford, Quicksands: A Memoir

“When one’s young, everything is a rehearsal. To be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance.”
― Sybille Bedford, A Compass Error

“What I learnt came to me . . . at second and at third hand, in chunks and puzzles, degrees and flashes.”
― Sybille Bedford, A Legacy

“She was also incapacitated by much of daily life and had 'no aptitude whatsoever' for domesticity.”
― Sybille Bedford

“Architecture without pain, art looked at in undiluted pleasure, enjoyment without anxiety, compunction, heartache: there is no beggar woman in the church door, no ragged child or sore animal in the square. The water is safe and the wallet is inside the pocket. There will be no missed plane connection. We are in a country where the curable ills are taken care of. We are in a country where the mechanics of living from transport to domestic heating (alack, poor Britain!) function imaginatively and well; where it goes without saying that the sick are looked after and secure and the young well educated and well trained; where ingenuity is used to heal delinquents and to mitigate at least the physical dependence of old age; where there is work for all and some individual seizure, and men and women have not been entirely alienated yet from their natural environment; where there is care for freedom and where the country as a whole has rounded the drive to power and prestige beyond its borders and where the will to peace is not eroded by doctrine, national self-love, and unmanageable fears; where people are kindly, honest, helpful, sane, reliable, resourceful, and cool-headed; where stranger–shyly–smiles to stranger. "Portrait Sketch of a Country: Denmark 1962”
― Sybille Bedford, Pleasures and Landscapes

“A biographer is an artist under oath.”
― Sybille Bedford, Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education

“War and the threat of war begin when all is not well at home. Countries that solve their own problems are no problem to others. How did it all come about; how did the Danes get that way? Why are they what they are? Was the country particularly favored? Did they try to keep the peace in the past? Did they practice religious tolerance? The answers are no. Is it then all hit or miss? As People holding a territory poor rather than rich, with a history as long, mixed, and disturbed as the next country's–are these facts that must be fed into the computer, and what might the computer's answer be? Portugal? Switzerland? Prussia? – "Portrait Sketch of a Country" (Denmark 1962)”
― Sybille Bedford, Pleasures and Landscapes

“A devastating, a traumatic defeat, [to Germany] and the Danes might well have fallen into a Treaty of Versailles mentality. Mysteriously, they did not. Instead they redirected their aims and will; they did turn inward. They changed their agriculture from grain to dairy products, they set up cooperatives, gave their attention to social and economic advancement, chose a neutral policy, developed an altogether new kind of adult schooling. It was a chain reaction, but the links gradually forged themselves into a virtuous circuit. It has turned out well. [from "Portrait Sketch of a Country: Denmark 1962"]”
― Sybille Bedford, Pleasures and Landscapes

“Guillermo was lonely and serviceable and always rushed in to do the things one wanted in a way one did not want them done.”
― Sybille Bedford, A Visit to Don Otavio

“I have not the slightest desire to see the wonders of nature', said E.
'Of course not my dear. But what else can we do?”
― Sybille Bedford, A Visit to Don Otavio

“Dominion over his environment was supposed to be a hallmark of man. Now, that dominion is almost wholly vicarious, derived from the past ingenuity of others. In urban and industrial communities it is never direct, physical or spontaneous. Our implements are at twelve removes and we may all live to live inside so many Thermos flasks. It may be well to remember how to use a pair of sticks and a stone.”
― Sybille Bedford, A Visit to Don Otavio

“My interest in how people lived was nourished quite literally by the food I shared with them.”
― Sybille Bedford, Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education

“In Europe where human relations like clothes are supposed to last, one’s got to be wearable. In France one has to be interesting, in Italy pleasant, in England one has to fit.”
― Sybille Bedford, A Visit to Don Otavio

“People are not the same—it is unnatural to pretend they are.”
― Sybille Bedford, A Favourite of the Gods and A Compass Error

“Besides, far better always to fend alone than with an uncertain ally.”
― Sybille Bedford, A Favourite of the Gods and A Compass Error

“Mama, unforgivingness breeds war; exploited resentment, treasured grievances. If we don’t learn to forget a wrong no sooner than it’s done or said, if we don’t all of us—privately and collectively—draw a line below the past every day of our lives, we’re going to be sunk. We are sunk.”
― Sybille Bedford, A Favourite of the Gods

“To the young, so much is known and unknown. Before: the mystery, the blueprint, the half-imagined, half-refused. Once on the other side: the always-known, the click into place, acceptance; the unthought unthinkable turned fact, the plunge accomplished, the ship afloat. (Or: revulsion; recoil; regression.) For Flavia the shock – the double shock of recognition was in the heart (pleasure itself still eluded her that day), was a lightening, a light slight puff of happiness such as persists sometimes after awaking from a serene although forgotten dream. She told herself (the mind would not turn off) how cosy, how reassuring, how nice”
― Sybille Bedford, A Compass Error

“It is peculiar,” Sarah said; “theological dead-lock between non-practising members of two religions.”
― Sybille Bedford, A Legacy

“Flavia said: "How is one to live - if every step leads to another?"
"Like that," said Constanza.”
― Sybille Bedford, A Favourite of the Gods

“What was being put over (by Musso[lini] & Co.) was, she was never in doubt, based on trickery and false values, sanctified aggression, pandered to false pride; it made ignorant youth feel important, gave foolish people spurious hopes – it was dangerous stuff.”
― Sybille Bedford, Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education

“Hate is nothing, even in politics, hate is only temper and unhappiness; it’s an accident. It is stupid and unkind to let it overtake one.”
― Sybille Bedford, A Favourite of the Gods

“Im my native country I successfully avoided seeing the Grand Canyon; I avoided the Painted Desert, my nurse did not manage to drag me to Niagara. With all respect to Alexander von Humboldt, I will not get myself off this contraption to look at a tree however interesting.”
― Sybille Bedford