Nancy Mitford Quotes

I am sometimes bored by people, but never by life.

I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened.

The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life's essential unfairness.

If one can't be happy, one must be amused.

To fall in love you have to be in the state of mind for it to take, like a disease.

An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off: it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.

Sisters are a shield against life's cruel adversity.

What is so nice & so unexpected about life is the way it improves as it goes along. I think you should impress this fact on your children because I think young people have an awful feeling that life is slipping past them & they must do something - catch something - they don't quite know what, whereas they've only got to wait & it all comes.

If I had a girl I should say to her, 'Marry for love if you can, it won't last, but it is a very interesting experience and makes a good beginning in life. Later on, when you marry for money, for heaven's sake let it be big money. There are no other possible reasons for marrying at all.

The worst of being a Communist is the parties you may go to are - well - awfully funny and touching but not very gay...I don't see the point of sad parties, do you? And Left-wing people are always sad because they mind dreadfully about their causes, and the causes are always going so badly.

Life itself, she thought, as she went upstairs to dress for dinner, was stranger than dreams and far, far more disordered.

Life is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake, and here is one of them.

One thing about tourists is that it is very easy to get away from them. Like ants they follow a trail and a few yards each side of that trail there are none.

There are worse things than poverty, though I can't for the moment remember what they are.

I Love children, especially when they cry for then someone takes them away.

the test of a cook is how she boils an egg. My boiled eggs are fantastic, fabulous. Sometimes as hard as a 100 carat diamond, or again soft as a feather bed, or running like a cooling stream, they can also burst like fireworks from their shells and take on the look and rubbery texture of a baby octopus. Never a dull egg, with me.

Surely a King who loves pleasure is less dangerous than one who loves glory?

When the loo paper gets thicker and the writing paper thinner, it's always a bad sign, at home.

The English lord marries for love, and is rather inclined to love where money is; he rarely marries in order to improve his coat of arms.

One's emotions are intensified in Paris—one can be more happy and also more unhappy here than in any other place. But it is always a positive source of joy to live here, and there is nobody so miserable as a Parisian in exile from his town.

Paris in the early morning has a cheerful, bustling aspect, a promise of delicious things to come, a positive smell of coffee and croissants, quite peculiar to itself. The people welcome a new day as if they were certain of liking it, the shopkeepers pull up their blinds serene in the expectation of good trade, the workers go happily to their work, the people who have sat up all night in night-clubs go happily to their rest, the orchestra of motor-car horns, of clanking trams, of whistling policemen tunes up for the daily symphony, and everywhere is joy.

Americans relate all effort, all work, and all of life itself to the dollar. Their talk is of nothing but dollars.

I have only ever read one book in my life, and that is White Fang. It's so frightfully good I've never bothered to read another.

It's a funny thing that people are always ready to admit it if they've no talent for drawing or music, whereas everyone imagines that they themselves are capable of true love, which is a talent like any other, only far more rare.

Sun, silence, and happiness.