“One of the disadvantages of almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one's favorite writers. It gave one a curious feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one's dressing gown.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“I saw something nasty in the woodshed.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as Persuasion but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, 'Collecting material'. No one can object to that.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“That would be delightful,' agreed Flora, thinking how nasty and boring it would be.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“Mary, you know I hate parties. My idea of hell is a very large party in a cold room where everybody has to play hockey properly.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“Like all really strong-minded women, on whom everybody flops, she adored being bossed about. It was so restful.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“Surely she had endured enough for one evening without having to listen to intelligent conversation?”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“You have the most revolting Florence Nightingale complex,' said Mrs. Smiling.
It is not that at all, and well you know it. On the whole, I dislike my fellow beings; I find them so difficult to understand. But I have a tidy mind and untidy lives irritate me. Also, they are uncivilized.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“Flora sighed. It was curious that persons who lived what the novelists called a rich emotional life always seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“Here was an occasion, she thought, for indulging in that deliberate rudeness which only persons with habitually good manners have the right to commit...”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“Well,' said Mrs Smiling, 'it sounds an appalling place, but in a different way from all the others. I mean, it does sound interesting and appalling, while the others just sound appalling.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“Women are all alike-- aye fussin' over their fal-lals and bedazin' a man's eyes, when all they really want is man's blood and his heart out of his body and his soul and his pride....”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“On the whole, Flora liked it better when they were silent, though it did rather give her the feeling that she was acting in one of the less cheerful German highbrow films.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“Haven't you enough money?'
For she knew that this is what is the matter with nearly everybody over twenty-five.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“After another minute Reuben brought forth the following sentence:
"I ha' scranleted two hundred furrows come five o'clock down i' the bute."
It was a difficult remark, Flora felt, to which to reply.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“I do not object to the phenomena, but I do object to the parrot.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“There are some things (like first love and one’s first reviews) at which a woman in her middle years does not care to look too closely.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“The audience had run to beards and magenta shirts and original ways of arranging its neckwear; and not content with the ravages produced in its over-excitable nervous system by the remorseless workings of its critical intelligence, it had sat through a film of Japanese life called 'Yes,' made by a Norwegian film company in 1915 with Japanese actors, which lasted an hour and three-quarters and contained twelve close-ups of water-lilies lying perfectly still on a scummy pond and four suicides, all done extremely slowly.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“He was, she reflected, almost rudely like a tortoise; and she was glad her friend kept none as pets or they might have suspected mockery.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“The life of a journalist is poor, nasty, brutish, and short. So is his style”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“By the way, I adore my bedroom, but do you think I could have the curtains washed? I believe they are red; and I should so like to make sure.'
Judith had sunk into a reverie.
'Curtains?' she asked, vacantly, lifting her magnificent head. 'Child, child, it is many years since such trifles broke across the web of my solitude'.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“I think it's degrading of you, Flora,' cried Mrs Smiling at breakfast. 'Do you truly mean that you don't ever want to work at anything?'
Her friend replied after some thought: 'Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as "Persuasion", but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say "Collecting material." No one can object to that. Besides, I shall be.'
Mrs Smiling drank some coffee in silent disapproval.
'If you ask me,' continued Flora, 'I think I have much in common with Miss Austen. She liked everything to be tidy and pleasant and comfortable around her, and so do I. You see Mary,' - and here Flora began to grow earnest and to wave one finger about - 'unless everything is tidy and pleasant and comfortable all about one, people cannot even begin to enjoy life. I cannot endure messes.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“A straight nose is a great help if one wishes to look serious'.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“Curious how Love destroys every vestige of that politeness which the human race, in its years of evolution, has so painfully acquired.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“She glanced upwards for a second at the soft blue vault of the midsummer night sky. Not a cloud misted its solemn depths. Tomorrow would be a beautiful day.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“Flora inherited, however, from her father a strong will and from her mother a slender ankle.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“Richard had realized, not that Elfine was beautiful, but that he loved Elfine. (Young men frequently need this fact pointing out to them, as Flora knew by observing the antics of her friends.)”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
Stella Gibbons
Born place: in London, The United Kingdom
Born date January 5, 1902
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“...beauty was found beyond the surface. It was there, beyond the skin of this world, that a cure of ugliness could be could.”
― Ted Dekker, quote from Skin
“Always trust your intuition as it won't steer you wrong.”
― H.P. Mallory, quote from Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble
“If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory
That old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.”
― Wilfred Owen, quote from The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
“The abnormally large female cut the sandwich into four pieces and gave one to each before taking one for herself. They all took a bite and she grinned at their appreciative groans. “See?” she said around a mouthful of peanut butter and jelly. “Isn’t that good?”
“And so decadent,” Berg sighed. “I feel like I’m eating evil. Pure, unadulterated evil.”
“But good evil,” Finn added. “The finest evil ever.”
“Come!” Carl, the unabashed history fan and future historical “re-creator” of the lot—an activity Irene had always thought was an incredible waste of time for any human being with a brain—cried out,“Let us tell the others of this glory and what we have learned here today from the enemy She-wolf!”
“Huzzah!” they all cheered and ran out the kitchen back door.”
― quote from Big Bad Beast
“She hardly knew what to do, it had been so long since such strong feelings had borne down on her. It was like carrying another creature inside her, and nothing so benign and natural as a baby. Undamped, untamed, the pain and exultation of her attachment to them blew through Liga like a storm-wind carrying sharp leaves and struggling birds. How long she had known her daughters, and how well, and in what extraordinary vividness and detail! How blithely she had done the work of rearing them - it seemed to her now that she had had cause for towering, disabling anxieties about them; that what had seemed little plaints and sorrows in their childhoods were in fact off-drawings from much greater tragedies, from which she had tried to keep them but could not. And the joys she had had of them, too, their embraces and laughter - it was all too intense to be endured, this connection with them, which was a miniature of the connection with the forces that drove planet and season - the relentlessness of them, the randomness, the susceptibility to glory, to accident, to disaster. How soft had been her life in that other place, how safe and mild! And here she was, back where terrors could immobilize her, and wonders too; where life might become gulps of strong ale rather than sips of bloom-tea. She did not know whether she was capable of lifting the cup, let alone drinking the contents.”
― Margo Lanagan, quote from Tender Morsels
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