Helen Simonson Quotes

I believe there is a great deal too much mutual confession going on today, as if sharing one's problems somehow makes them go away. All it really does, of course, is increase the number of people who have to worry about a particular issue.

I know some people today would regard such love of country as ridiculously romantic and naïve... Patriotism itself has been hijacked by scabby youths with jackboots and bad teeth whose sole aim is to raise their own standard of living. But I do believe that there are those few who continue to believe in the England that Kipling loved. Unfortunately, we are a dusty bunch of relics.

Aunt Agatha says there isn't going to be a war," said Daniel, coming in behind her, laughing. "And so of course there won't be. They would never dream of defying her.

I can't abide people who dislike dogs,

Often, I think, thy don't believe in anything at all and they just want to prove to themselves that I don't really believe anything either. (The Vicar)

You are a wise man, Major, and I will consider your advice with great care - and humility." He finished his tea and rose from the table to go to his room. "But I must ask you, do you really understand what it means to be in love with an unsuitable woman?"
"My dear boy," said the Major. "Is there really any other kind?

I know something of shame [ ... ] How can we not all feel it? We are all small-minded people, creeping about the earth grubbing for our own advantage and making the very mistakes for which we want to humiliate our neighbors. [ ... ] I think we wake up every day with high intentions and by dusk we have routinely fallen short. Sometimes I think God created the darkness just so he didn't have to look at us all the time.

Ah yes, the dreaded one-way system ... He and Nancy had laughed later, imagining Dante redesigning Purgatory into a one-way system offering occasional glimpses of St. Peter and the pearly gates over two separate sets of dividing concrete barriers.

We all pick and choose and make our religion our own, do we not?

Compromises are often built on their being unspoken.

Humiliation is the sport of the petty

Despite his attempts to maintain a vigorous structure of errands, golf games, visits, and meetings, there were sometimes days like this one, filled with rain and touched with a gnawing sense of parts missing from life. When the slick mud ran in the flower beds and the clouds smothered the light, he missed his wife.

Only sometimes when we pick and choose among the rules we discover later that we have set aside something precious in the process.

I wish you a strong heart and the love of family this afternoon.

You Anglo-Saxons have largely broken away from such dependence on family. Each generation feels perfectly free to act alone and you are not afraid.

He could not, in good conscience, promote any association with Daisy Green and her band of ladies. He could more easily recommend gang membership or fence-hopping into the polar bear enclosure at the Regents Park zoo.

I would prefer you did not apologize for anyone else," she said. "My father always says that if we were as quick to own our own faults as we are to apologize for those of others, society might truly advance.

Such an awful fragility of love he thought that plans are made and broken and remade in these gaps between rational behavior.

The sky began to spit fat drops of rain and a cold gust of wind whipped dust and litter against his legs. The sadness vanished and he thought how glorious the day was.

Here he was dispensing them as advice when he had only just taken them in as revelation. So, he thought, do all men steal and display the shiny jackdaw treasure of other people's ideas.

It was never a good idea to confide in people. They always remembered, and when they came up to you in the street, years later, you could see the information was still firmly attached to your face and present in the way they said your name and the pressure of their hand clasping yours.

It was frustratingly common that children were no sooner gone from the nest and established in their own homes ... than they began to infantilize their own parents and wish them dead, or at least in assisted living.

While the lake lapped at their feet and the mountains absorbed their calls and the sky flung its blue parachute over their heads, he thought how wonderful it was that life was, after all, more simple than he had ever imagined.

I don't believe the greatest views in the world are great because they are vast or exotic,' she said. 'I think their power comes from the knowledge that they do not change. You look at them and you know they have been the same for a thousand years.

It's only now I realize how easy it was to do so on the backs of other women's sons.

It was the cheapest kind of rebuke, to call a woman ugly, but one to which small boys and grown men seemed equally quick to stoop when feeling challenged.

As I get older, I find myself insisting on my right to be philosophically sloppy.

Ah well, there you go. Young people are always demanding respect instead of trying to earn it. In my day, respect was something to strive for. Something to be given, not taken. Major Pettigrew

It took him a moment to realize that they had been painted to look like fingernails, and he sighed over the extraordinary range of female vanities.

There is nothing more corrosive to character than money.

Is it that our needs grew smaller?" asked Hugh. "Or is it just that the fear and deprivation makes one appreciate simple things more?" "I think our ability to be happy gets covered up by the years of petty rubbing along in the world, the getting ahead," said Daniel. "But war burns away all the years of decay, like an old penny dropped into vinegar.

he realized he had inspired a sense of trust and indebtedness that would make it entirely impossible for an honorable man to attempt to kiss her anytime soon. He cursed himself for a fool. It

He had never imagined so clearly the consequences of mailing a letter - the impossibility of retrieving it from the iron mouth of the box; the inevitability if its steady progress through the postal system; the passing from bag to bag and postman to postman until a lone man in a van pulls up to the door and pushes a small pile through the letterbox. It seemed suddenly horrible that one's words could not be taken back, one's thoughts allowed none of the remediation of speaking face to face.

I said we would be informal," said Agatha. "I did not say we would be eccentric.

So he dreams himself the life he cannot have?" "Exactly. But we, who can do anything, we refuse to live our dreams on the basis that they are not practical. So tell me, who is to be pitied more?

Do you really know what it means to be in love with an unsuitable woman?" "Is there any other kind?

Memories were like tomb paintings, thought the Major, the colors still vivid no matter how many layers of mud and sand time deposited. Scrape at them and they come up all red and blazing.

Men these days expect their wives to be as dazzling as their mistresses."
That's shocking," said the Major. "How on earth will they tell them apart?

It also occurred to him that perhaps this only meant that the less he saw of people, the more kindly he felt toward them, and that this might explain his current mild exasperation with his many condolence-offering acquaintances.

He opened his mouth to say that she looked extremely beautiful and deserved armfuls of roses, but the words were lost in committee somewhere, shuffled aside by the parts of his head that worked full-time at avoiding ridicule.

Young people are always demanding respect instead of trying to earn it. In my day, respect was something to strive for. Something to be given, not taken.

She gathered up a few thoughts of the lovelier parts of the afternoon and stowed them away in the back of her mind, where they might remind her at some future date that lovely afternoons do not survive the chill of dusk.

It would be a primal offering of food from man to woman and a satisfyingly primitive declaration of intent. However, he mused, one could never be sure these days who would be offended by being handed a dead mallard bleeding from a breast full of tooth-breaking shot and sticky about the neck with dog saliva.

The world is full of small ignorances. We must all do our best to ignore them and thereby keep them small, don't you think

But of course we do not like to listen to our mothers," said Mrs. Ali, smiling. "At least, not until long after we are mothers ourselves.

He liked the clover, evidence of the country always pressing in close, quietly sabotaging anyone who tried to manicure nature into suburban submission.

You are not the first man to miss a woman's more subtle communication ... They think they are waving when we see only the calm sea, and pretty soon everybody drowns.

But it's not enough to be in love. It's about how you spend your days, what you do together, who you choose as friends, and most of all it's what work you do ... Better to break both our hearts now than watch them wither away over time.

Her favourite summer memories were not of events themselves, of picnics, sea bathing, tennis afternoons and cricket matches, but of watching Hugh and Daniel enjoying them and locking into memory the delight in their faces and their open laughter.

At our age, surely there are better things to sustain us, to sustain a marriage, than the brief flame of passion?" ... "You are mistaken, Ernest," she said at last. "There is only the passionate spark. Without it, two people living together may be lonelier than if they lived quite alone.

She looked at him and he read in her eyes a disappointment that he should have stooped to the dead relative excuse. Yet he was as entitled as the next man to use it. People did it all the time; it was understood that there was a defined window of availability beginning a decent few days after a funeral and continuing for no more than a couple of months. Of course, some people took dreadful advantage and a year later were still hauling around their dead relatives on their backs, showing them off to explain late tax payments and missed dentist appointments: something he would never do.

In which local hero Colonel Arthur Pettigrew, of the British army in India, held off a train full of murderous thugs to rescue a local Maharajah's youngest wife. For his heroism, the Colonel was awarded a British Order of Merit and personally presented with a pair

I tell myself it does not matter what one reads
favorite authors, particular themes
as long as we read something. It is not even important to own the books.

My parents told me to marry for money,' said her husband. 'But I chose the love of a strong woman.'

'And look what trouble I turned out to be,' she said.

Sometimes you can't fix everything," said Amina. "Life isn't always like books."
"No, it's not.

He wondered whether it was his fault Roger had the perceptiveness of concrete.

But if all else fails, I can always write her a sonnet." "A sonnet?" said Hugh. "No woman can resist having her name rhymed with a flower in iambic pentameter," said Daniel.

I admire your enthusiasm...but I cannot, in good conscience, assist you with any civic unrest.'
'Civic unrest? This is war, Major," said Alice, chuckling at him. 'Man the barricades and break out the Molotov cocktails!

...so Beatrice, who was tired of people feeling free to interrogate on her determination to live free of a husband, bit her lip and did not answer.

He opened the gun box, lifted out the sections of his own gun, for comparison. They slid together with well-oiled clicks. Laying the two guns side by side, he experienced a momentary lapse of faith. They looked nothing like a pair. His own gun looked fat and polished. It almost breathed as it lay on the slab. Bertie's gun looked like a sketch, or a preliminary model done in cheap materials to get the shape right and then discarded.

There is often an inverse correlation between genius and personal hygiene.

Oh, you're American,' said Mrs. Khan, holding out her hand. 'What a charming costume.'
'The Bengal Lancers were apparently a famous Anglo-Indian regiment,' said the young man. He pulled at his thighs to display the full ballooning of the white jodhpurs. 'Though how the Brits conquered the empire wearing clown pants is beyond me.'
'From the nation that conquered the West wearing leather chaps and hats made of dead squirrel,' said the Major.

War does have a way of interfering with one's most closely held desires.