Ruth Adam > Quotes

“They weren’t really what we should have chosen anyway,” we consoled each other. The Colonel had liked crimson with black lines better than anything, but we couldn’t make out on what basis he had chosen brown cabbages or pale-grey disembodied leaves for the rest of the walls. We decided that he must have sent for countless books of samples and gone through them, carefully choosing only the ones that he could be certain no one else could possibly select. At that time it was forbidden by law to spend any money on re-decorating a house.”
― Ruth Adam, A House in the Country

“Every boy should have a year at the heels of an old craftsman sometime in his life. A dozen nursery schools could not have given Colin the half of what Howard gave him. Howard accepted him, with serious and conscientious calm, like a schoolmaster who has got countless generations of boys through their first Latin primer and then let them go, satisfied that the foundations have been well laid.”
― Ruth Adam, A House in the Country