E.M. Delafield · 388 pages
Rating: (3.5K votes)
“She is never alone when she has Her Books. Books, to her, are Friends. Give her Shakespeare or Jane Austen, Meredith or Hardy, and she is Lost - lost in a world of her own. She sleeps so little that most of her nights are spent reading.”
― E.M. Delafield, quote from Diary of a Provincial Lady
“Am struck by paradoxical thought that youth is by no means the happiest time of life, but that most of the rest of life is tinged by regret for its passing, and wonder what old age will feel like, in this respect. (Shall no doubt discover very shortly.)”
― E.M. Delafield, quote from Diary of a Provincial Lady
“Mucho antes de que estuviéramos a medio camino, y sabedora de que nunca llegaría a la roca, ya confiaba en que la segunda esposa de Robert fuera buena con los niños. La vizcondesa, que nadaba tranquilamente, me preguntó si estaba bien. "Oh, sí", contesté, y acto seguido me hundí.
(Duda: ¿Castigo divino?)”
― E.M. Delafield, quote from Diary of a Provincial Lady
“(Query: Is it possible to cultivate the art of conversation when living in the country all the year round?)”
― E.M. Delafield, quote from Diary of a Provincial Lady
“This suggests Query: Does Robert, perhaps, take in what I say even when he makes no reply?”
― E.M. Delafield, quote from Diary of a Provincial Lady
“(Note: Extreme sensibility of the French sometimes makes them difficult to deal with.)”
― E.M. Delafield, quote from Diary of a Provincial Lady
“My two great loves. I think I always knew I would be Belly Fisher one day. I just didn't know it was going to happen like this.”
― Jenny Han, quote from We'll Always Have Summer
“Despite popular belief, hitting someone with a closed fist actually hurts the hitter almost as much as the hittee.”
― Ally Carter, quote from United We Spy
“Evolution, or its driving engine natural selection, has no foresight. In every generation within every species, the individuals best equipped to survive and reproduce contribute more than their fair share of genes to the next generation. The consequence, blind as it is, is the nearest approach to foresight that nature permits. [...] That’s the kind of thing natural selection does all the time. It is always tinkering: here shrinking a bit, there expanding a bit, constantly adjusting, putting on and taking off, optimising immediate reproductive success. Survival in future centuries doesn’t enter into the calculation, for the good reason that it isn’t really a calculation at all. It all happens automatically, as some genes survive in the gene pool and others don’t.”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
“The impetus of existing plans is always stronger than the impulse to change. The Kaiser could not change Moltke’s plan nor could Kitchener alter Henry Wilson’s nor Lanrezac alter Joffre’s.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, quote from The Guns of August
“It is one of life's bitterest truths that bedtime so often arrives just when things are really getting interesting.”
― Lemony Snicket, quote from The Grim Grotto
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