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

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.

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.

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

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

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

There have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I saw something nasty in the woodshed.