Rosamond Lehmann Quotes

One can present people with opportunities. One cannot make them equal to them.

One should always act from one's inner sense of rhythm.

Yes, we are sure of it. These walls enclose a world. Here is continuity spinning a web from room to room, from year to year. It is safe in this house.

Holidays, if you enjoy them, have no history.

I want to do something absolutely different, or perhaps nothing at all: just stay where I am, in my home, and absorb each hour, each day, and be alone; and read and think; and walk about the garden in the night; and wait, wait...

It'll all come right. Because, of course, I do believe...I believe - I believe in everything...sun, moon, stars, in seasons - trees, flowers - people, music, life...yes, in life.

But poetry is not to be lived, except for the few to whom it is more important than self-preservation.

I have decided to keep a record of my inmost real-self thoughts. Perhaps it will help me to find out what I really am like: horrid, I know: selfish, conceited, and material-minded. For instance, lately whenever I've tried to concentrate on anything serious or beautiful, I've started thinking about the Spencers' dance next week. I am ashamed of my pettiness. I'm going to try to do better this year
develop my character more and not always be thinking about enjoying myself. I've always been so happy, I dread disappointment and unhappiness, but they would be good for me. But I don't want them.

It's the thought that counts.

Still, now and then they seemed to be holding behind them the surprising, the magic vistas of childhood - the sudden snow at night, whirling and furring without sound against the window; the full moon and all its shadows on the lawn; the Christmas sleigh and reindeer in the sky.

In a corner of the churchyard grew a plantation of white violets, enormously plump and prosperous-looking ... I saw the dead stretched out under me in the earth, feeding these flowers with a thin milk drawn from their bones.

The present mood in which they sat relaxed was nothing more than the relief of two people coming back to a bombed building once familiar, shared as a dwelling, and finding all over the smashed foundations a rose-ash haze of willow herb. No more, no less. It is a ruin; but suspense at least, at least the need for sterile resolution, have evaporated with the fact of the return. Terror of nothingness contracts before the contemplation of it. It is not, after all, vacancy, but space; an area razed, roped off by time; by time refertilized, sown with a transfiguration, a ruin-haunting, ghost-spun No Man's crop of grace.

Anything that becomes a cult, or a mass movement, loses its moral and spiritual value. The crusade has to be personal, individual. As soon as it becomes collective it loses its purpose.

Another five minutes, thought Olivia, and shut her eyes. Not to fall asleep again; but to go back as it were and do the thing gradually---detach oneself softly, float up serenely from the clinging delectable fringes. Oh, heavenly sleep! Why must one cast it from one, all unprepared, unwilling? Caught out again by Kate in the very act! You're not trying , you could wake up if you wanted to: that was their attitude. And regularly one began the day convicted of inferiority, of a sluggish voluptuous nature, seriously lacking in will-power.

[On Ian Fleming:] The trouble with Ian is that he gets off with women because he can't get on with them.