Stella Gibbons Quotes

There have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm

She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple.

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.

The life of a journalist is poor, nasty, brutish, and short. So is his style

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.

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.

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.

Nature is all very well in her place, but she must not be allowed to make things untidy.

Happiness can never hope to command so much interest as distress.

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.

I do not object to the phenomena, but I do object to the parrot.

That would be delightful,' agreed Flora, thinking how nasty and boring it would be.

Surely she had endured enough for one evening without having to listen to intelligent conversation?

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.

Like all really strong-minded women, on whom everybody flops, she adored being bossed about. It was so restful.

A straight nose is a great help if one wishes to look serious'.

Here was an occasion, she thought, for indulging in that deliberate rudeness which only persons with habitually good manners have the right to commit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Curious how Love destroys every vestige of that politeness which the human race, in its years of evolution, has so painfully acquired.

By god, DH Lawrence was right when he said there must be a dumb, dark, dull, bitter belly-tension between a man and a woman, and how else could this be achieved save in the long monotony of marriage?

Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm.

And when April like an over-lustful lover leaped upon the lush flanks of the Downs there would be yet another child in the wretched hut down on Nettle Flitch Field, where Meriam housed the fruits of her shame.