Beverley Nichols > Quotes

“Let us be honest: most of us rather like our cats to have a streak of wickedness. I should not feel quite easy in the company of any cat that walked around the house with a saintly expression.”
― Beverley Nichols, Cats' A-Z

“Long experience has taught me that people who do not like geraniums have something morally unsound about them. Sooner or later you will find them out; you will discover that they drink, or steal books, or speak sharply to cats. Never trust a man or a woman who is not passionately devoted to geraniums.”
― Beverley Nichols, Merry Hall

“A garden without cats, it will be generally agreed, can scarcely deserve to be called a garden at all...much of the magic of the heather beds would vanish if, as we bent over them, there was no chance that we might hear a faint rustle among the blossoms, and find ourselves staring into a pair of sleepy green eyes.”
― Beverley Nichols, Garden Open Tomorrow

“Often, when I have been feeling lonely, when a book as been thrust aside in boredom [...] I have lain back and stared at the shadows on the ceiling, wondering what life is all about [...] and then, suddenly, there is the echo of the swinging door, and across the carpet, walking with the utmost delicacy and precision, stalks Four or Five or Oscar. He sits down on the floor beside me, regarding my long legs, my old jumper, and my floppy arms, with a purely practical interest. Which part of this large male body will form the most appropriate lap? Usually he settles for the chest. Whereupon he springs up and there is a feeling of cold fur [...] and the tip of an icy nose, thrust against my wrist and a positive tattoo of purrs. And I no longer wonder what life is all about.”
― Beverley Nichols, Cats' A. B. C

“We both know, you and I, that if all men were gardeners, the world at last would be at peace.”
― Beverley Nichols, Green Grows the City: The Story of a London Garden

“Do you ever find yourself bursting into a sort of lunatic laughter at the sheer prettiness of things?”
― Beverley Nichols, Garden Open Tomorrow

“Marriage is a book in which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.”
― Beverley Nichols

“To be overcome by the fragrance of flowers is a delectable form of defeat.
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― Beverley Nichols

“When Mrs. Pattern first came into my life, she was gossiping in the lane with a nursemaid who was wheeling a perambulator containing a baby of exceptional repulsiveness.Babies, as all bachelors will agree, should not be allowed at large unless they are heavily draped, and fitted with various appliances for absorbing sound and moisture. If young married persons persist in their selfish pursuit of populating the planet, they should be compelled to bear the consequences. They should be shut behind high walls, clutching the terrible bundles which they have brought into the world, and when they emerge into society, if they insist on bringing these bundles with them, they should see that they are properly cloaked, muted, sealed up and, above all, dry. They should not wave them about in the streets to the alarm of sensitive persons who are used to the company of Siamese cats.”
― Beverley Nichols

“They came on one of April's most brilliant days--a day as sparkling as a newly-washed lemon...a day when even the shadows were a melange of blue and orange and jade, like the shadows that poured from the tipsy brush of Monet.”
― Beverley Nichols, A Thatched Roof

“Well, I love geraniums, and anybody who does not love geraniums must obviously be a depraved and loathsome person.”
― Beverley Nichols, Merry Hall

“One of the many reasons why gardens are increasingly precious to us in this day and age is that they help us to escape from the tyranny of speed. Our skies are streaked with jets, our roads have turned to race-tracks, and in the cities the crowds rush to and fro as though the devil were at their heels. But as soon as we open the garden gate, Time seems almost to stand still, slowing down to the gentle ticking of the Clock of the Universe.”
― Beverley Nichols, Forty Favourite Flowers

“For a garden is a mistress, and gardening is a blend of all the arts, and if it is not the death of me, sooner or later, I shall be much surprised.”
― Beverley Nichols, Merry Hall

“Why do insurance companies, when they want to describe an act of God, invariably pick on something which sounds much more like an act of the Devil? One would think that God was exclusively concerned in making hurricanes, smallpox, thunderbolts, and dry rot. They seem to forget that He also manufactures rainbows, apple-blossom, and Siamese kittens. However, that is, perhaps, a diversion.”
― Beverley Nichols, Sunlight on the Lawn

“Where the piano is, there is one's treasure, as far as I am concerned....nothing, surely, is more delightful than sitting down at the piano on a summer day, and playing Chopin or Debussy while the natural sunlight drifts over one's shoulders through the vines outside, creating a filigree of shadow in the printed page...a shifting pattern of ghostly leaf and blossom that dances to the mood of the music.”
― Beverley Nichols, Beverley Nichols' Cats' X. Y. Z.

“Whenever I arrive in my garden, I Make The Tour. Is this a personal idiosyncrasy, or do all good gardeners do it? It would be interesting to know. By Making The Tour, I mean only that I step from the front window, turn to the right, and make an infinitely detailed examination of every foot of ground, every shrub and tree, walking always over an appointed course.

There are certain very definite rules to be observed when you are Making The Tour. The chief rule is that you must never take anything out of its order. You may be longing to see if a crocus has come out in the orchard, but it is strictly forbidden to look before you have inspected all the various beds, bushes and trees that lead up to the orchard.

You must not look at the bed ahead before you have finished with the bed immediately in front of you. You may see, out of the corner of your eye, a gleam of strange and unsuspected scarlet in the next bed but one, but you must steel yourself against rushing to this exciting blaze, and you must stare with cool eyes at the earth in front, which is apparently blank, until you have made certain that it is not hiding anything. Otherwise you will find that you rush wildly round the garden, discover one or two sensational events, and then decide that nothing else has happened. Which means that you miss all the thrill of tiny shoots, the first lifting of the lids of wallflowers, the first precious gold of the witch-hazel, the early spear of the snowdrop.”
― Beverley Nichols, Down the Garden Path

“It seemed to me that a great many fences had been put up all over the world, in the long course of history, that were not necessary. Fences round nations, fences round property. They were supposed to be symbols of security, but they were cheating symbols. They had a precisely opposite effect from that which was intended. They did not prevent crime, they incited it; they led not to peace but to war. A world without fences would be a better world.”
― Beverley Nichols, Sunlight on the Lawn

“There are a thousand 'greatest' melodies, just as there are a thousand 'greatest' poems and a thousand 'greatest' pictures, because there are a thousand moods in the mind of man when a certain note rings with the most clarity--when a certain design is most sharply silhouetted against the changing curtain of his mind.”
― Beverley Nichols, A Thatched Roof

“...a cyclamen that looks like a flight of butterflies, frozen for a single, exquisite moment in the white heart of Time...”
― Beverley Nichols, Down the Garden Path

“I think it is silly to be amateur about anything when one has an opportunity of learning.”
― Beverley Nichols, Down the Garden Path

“The one thing of which we are certain, in an uncertain universe, is that energy is never lost. It is transformed, but it never disappears.”
― Beverley Nichols, Down the Garden Path

“I want to wear out,' he [Oldfield] said very softly. 'To wear out. Not to rust out.”
― Beverley Nichols

“Into the room, with great dignity, stalked One and Four. They had mud on their paws, and they naturally decided to sit on my lap. They smelt of moss and loam, and they both set up a slow, tranquil purr. Cats, I thought, are the best.”
― Beverley Nichols, Merry Hall

“By the way, the best place to find names for fictional characters, if you are ever foolish enough to write a novel, is in a Bradshaw or an ABC. All the nicest people always sound like railway stations.”
― Beverley Nichols, Merry Hall

“Some people find importance in the photographs of those titanic mushrooms of atomic poison which are periodically exploded over the world's deserts; I find greater importance in one very small mushroom which mysteriously springs up in the shadow of the tool-shed.”
― Beverley Nichols, Sunlight on the Lawn

“The Oldfields of the future are beyond hearing; they are shut up in the factories and the workshops, leading a rackety and mechanical existence, to the damage of their bodies and the peril of their souls, for the sake of an extra pound or so a week, which they promptly spend on mental or physical narcotics.”
― Beverley Nichols, Merry Hall

“Having obtained your design, and buried your rocks, your next task is to exercise phenomenal restraint about the things which you put in. I have always been a fervent advocate of birth-control, but since I have been the owner of a rock garden my fervour has increased a hundred-fold. The prolificacy of the common saxifrage is positively embarrassing. The speed with which the rock rose reproduces itself brings a blush to the cheek. Violas appear to have absolutely no self-control, and as for the alyssum . . . well, if we behaved like the alyssum, Australia would be over-populated before the year is out.”
― Beverley Nichols, Down the Garden Path

“If these are the achievements of man, give me the achievements of geraniums.”
― Beverley Nichols, Green Grows the City: The Story of a London Garden

“On and on we wander in these pages--and we never reach the point because, happily, there is no point to reach.”
― Beverley Nichols, A Thatched Roof

“...If you are picking a bunch of mixed flowers, and if you happen to see, over in a corner, a small, sad, neglected-looking pink or paeony that is all by itself and has obviously never had a chance in life, you have not the heart to pass it by, to leave it to mourn alone, while the night comes on. You have to go back and pick it, very carefully, and put it in the centre of the bunch among its fair companions, in the place of honour.”
― Beverley Nichols, Merry Hall