Laura > Recent Status Updates

So I told him what was in fact not the truth, that I usually had a glass of champagne about that time, and asked him to join me.

It seemed to me I grew younger daily with each adult habit I acquired. [...] I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of a nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.

[T]he hot spring of anarchy rose from depths where there was no solid earth, and burst into the sunlight - a rainbow in its cooling vapours - with a power the rocks could not repress.

[N]o one minds a man getting tight once or twice a term. In fact he ought to on certain occasions.

You can't be doing any work. Not that it madders particularly if you're making something of your career elsewhere - but are you?

None of these people you go about with pull any weight in their own colleges, and that's the real test. They think because they've got a lot of money to throw about, they can do anything.

The lovely daughter whom Lady Marchmain is bringing out this season ... witty as well as ornamental ... the most popular débutante.

I suppose that Julia must have her enjoyment the same as other young ladies, though what they always want to go to London for in the best of the summer and the gardens all out, I have never understood.

I think it's terribly brilliant of Sebastian to have discovered you. Where do you lurk?

Eash as he came into the room [...] noticed Sebastian and myself with a polite lack of curiosity which seemed to say: "W should not dream of being so offensive as to suggest you never met us before."

It was typical of him, I reflected, to assume I knew where he lived; but, then, I did know.

You want either a first or a fourth. There is no value in anything in between. Time spent on a good second is time thrown away.

It only shows what effect judicious advice can have, properly delivered, at the right moment. I wish I had some for you, but I haven't.

[T]he sweet scent of tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger's breadth above the turf and hold us suspended.

I've got a motor-car and a basket of strawberries and a bottle of Château Peyraguey - which isn't a wine you've ever tasted, so don't pretend. It's heaven with strawberries.

A more sensitive man would have seen that he had failed to be impressive, perhaps he saw, for he added in a petulant schoolmasterish way: "All I ask is loyal cooperation."

Here at the age of thirty-nine I began to be old. I felt stiff and weary in the evenings and reluctant to go out of camp; I developed proprietary claims to certain chairs and newspapers; I regularly drank three glasses of gin before dinner, never more or less, and went to bed immediately after the nine o'clock news. I was always awake and fretful an hour before reveille.

It was impossible to foresee, in the spring of 1844, the present cult of the English country house. It seemed then that the ancestral seats which were our chief national artistic achievement were doomed to decay and spoliation like the monasteries in the sixteenth century.

It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster [...] and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find distasteful.

It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster [...] and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find distasteful.

It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster [...] and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find distasteful.

"Since wind was identified with breath, breath with life, life with soul, soul with divinity, it is hardly surprising that the winds became personified with gods."

Novelists liked to imagine the interconnectedness of things - as though all people in the big city were part of some great organism, their lives intertwined. He thought of the poet's saying that the preachers liked to quote: "No man is an island." Or the other: " Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." Foolish, sentimental tricks of the mind, probably. Reality was fragmented.

"I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I found joy in the things that made me happy."

"I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I found joy in the things that made me happy."

"[I]f books define places, then writing books was important, and that we needed books by us and about us."

"As sure as time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he'll look for his lessons."

"Sometimes reality comes crashing down on you. Other times reality simply waits, patiently, for you to run out of the energy it takes to deny it."

"But the problem with rules, be reflected, was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time there were simply /ways/, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure which side of the line you stood on."