Jane > Jane's Quotes

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins

“Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“Better a witty fool, than a foolish wit.”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“Love sought is good, but giv'n unsought is better.”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“Journeys end in lovers meeting,
Every wise man's son doth know.”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun; it shines everywhere.”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“In nature there's no blemish but the mind;
None can be called deformed but the unkind:
Virtue is beauty, but the beauteous evil
Are empty trunks, o'erflourished by the devil.”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“It is one of the oddest and sometimes one of the most charming characteristics of English weather that at times one season borrows complete days from another, spring from summer, winter from spring. And it may be that these milky days of winter, which seem borrowed from April, are automatically filled with the sadness of things out of their time.”
― H.E. Bates, Through the Woods

“And here, it seems to me, is much of the secret of the charm of woods in England. A wood should never be vast. The best woods are small, a few acres in extent, not much more than copses. The word forest creates in the mind a feeling of grandeur, of something primeval.”
― H.E. Bates, Through the Woods

“If I shut my eyes it returns: the evocation of a whole wood, a whole world of wood-darkness and flowers and birds and late summer silence, of a million leaves turning mellowly to death. It becomes then more than the mere memory of a wood, the first and the best wood I have ever known. It is the redistillation of another and more lovely world.”
― H.E. Bates, Through the Woods

“A wood at night, or even more at twilight, can be a strange place. Fear begins to come more quickly in a wood, with darkness and twilight, than in any other place I know.”
― H.E. Bates, Through the Woods

“Miss Parkinson lived alone in a big bay-windowed house of Edwardian brick with a vast garden of decaying fruit trees and untidy hedges of gigantic size. She was great at making elderberry wine and bottling fruit and preserves and lemon curd and drying flowers for winter. She felt, like Halibut, that things were not as they used to be. The synthetic curse of modern times lay thick on everything. There was everywhere a sad drift from Nature.”
― H.E. Bates

“But I drew the line, one evening, at Jerry O'Keefe's, the fish-shop where people crammed in late for hot plates of peas and chips and yellow-battered fish, in a kind of boiler house of steaming fat, after the last cinema show or the old theatre.
'But why?' she said. 'Why? It looks fun in there.'
I said I did not think it the place for her, and she said:
'You talk like a parson or something. You talk just like old Miss Crouch.'
'I'm not taking you,' I said.
'Why? If it's good enough for these people it's good enough for us, isn't it?'
'No.'
'That's because you're really an awful snob,' she said. 'You're too uppish to be seen in there.'
'It's not myself,' I said. 'It's you.'
'Are you going to take me or aren't you?' she said.
'No,' I said. 'I'm not.'
She turned and walked down the street. I stood for a moment alone, stubbornly, watching her swinging away into darkness out of the steamy, glowing gas-light. Then I had a moment of sickness when I felt she was walking out of my life, that I had given her impossible offence and that I should never see her again.
'Wait,' I said, 'wait. Don't go like that. I'll take you.”
― H.E. Bates , Love for Lydia

“Blowsily, frowsily, comfortably, toothlessly, Mrs Candleton was sleeping away the afternoon in her hair-curlers and her pinnafore.”
― H.E. Bates, Seven by Five

“Every morning Mrs Eglantine sat at the round bamboo bar of the New Pacific Hotel and drank her breakfast. This consisted of two quick large brandies, followed by several slower ones. By noon breakfast had become lunch and by two o'clock the pouches under and above Mrs Eglantine's bleared blue eyes began to look like large puffed pink prawns.”
― H.E. Bates, Seven by Five

“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Atticus, he was real nice."

"Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion faster than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“It’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn’t hurt you.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder

“The real things haven't changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures; and have courage when things go wrong.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder

“When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, "What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?"
"They are the days of a long time ago, Laura," Pa said. "Go to sleep, now."
But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods,…
She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder

“We who live in quiet places have the opportunity to become acquainted with ourselves, to think our own thoughts and live our own lives in a way that is not possible for those keeping up with the crowd.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder

“Some old-fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat. In our mad rush for progress and modern improvements let's be sure we take along with us all the old-fashioned things worth while.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder, A Family Collection: Life on the Farm and in the Country, Making a Home; the Ways of the World, a Woman's Role

“She heard pa shouting,"Jiminy crickets!It's raining fish-hooks and hammer handles!”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek

“If only I had some grease I could fix some kind of a light," Ma considered. "We didn't lack for light when I was a girl before this newfangled kerosene was ever heard of."

"That's so," said Pa. "These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraph and kerosene and coal stoves--they're good things to have, but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter