Downton Abbey Quotes

Walter looked like he could chew nails and still come back for a helping of chain link fence. "Why can't Romeo and Juliet meet in a garden like in Downton Abbey?" Romeo asked. "I mean who meets on a balcony? How real is that? ~ Suzanne M. Trauth

'Downton Abbey' didn't have the impact it had just because it was a good story about people. It was something about that period and that world that was fascinating to people on a level that wasn't just as an entertainment. ~ Noah Hawley

Obviously, I play a villain in 'Downton Abbey'. As an actor, you want to get a variety of roles, so to be offered the part of Joe, it was perfect. ~ Rob James-Collier

I am a huge 'Downton Abbey' fan - huge! ~ Joan Rivers

I get invited to a lot more glamorous parties since I've been in 'Downton Abbey,' which has made me much more fashion conscious. ~ Lesley Nicol

With 'Downton Abbey,' you're always stuck in one stately home. ~ Kit Harington

'Downton Abbey' is one of my favourite shows ever - it's just beautifully filmed, and the stories and characters are so wonderful. ~ Amanda Donohoe

When dealing with the excessively rich and privileged, you've got your two basic approaches. One is to go in hard and deliberately working class. A regional accent is always a plus in this. Seawoll has been known to deploy a Mancunian dialect so impenetrable that members of Oasis would have needed subtitles, and graduate entries with double firsts from Oxford practise a credible Estuary in the mirror and drop their glottals with gay abandon when necessary.

That approach only works if the subject suffers from residual middle-class guilt – unfortunately the properly posh, the nouveau riche and senior legal professionals are rarely prey to such weaknesses. For them you have to go in obliquely and with maximum Downton Abbey.

Fortunately for us we have just the man. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

Look, it comes down to whether or not you love me! That's all! That's it! The rest is detail ~ Tom Branson

The business of life is the acquisition of memories. In the end that's all there is. ~ Carson Of Downton Abbey.

I sometimes wonder what it would have been like if I'd got 'Downton Abbey' when I was 22. ~ Lesley Nicol

When I left 'Downton Abbey,' it hadn't yet taken off and become the phenomenon that it is, to this day. That all happened after I left. But, it was fabulous to be a part of it and to be a part of the cast. We had an absolute ball! ~ Rose Leslie

If you're an English actor, and you're asked to do an episode - especially the Christmas episode - of 'Downton Abbey,' you can't turn it down. It's like, 'Of course!' ~ Janet Montgomery

The acting in 'Downton Abbey' has been consistently excellent across the board. ~ James Frain

Hope is a tease designed to prevent us accepting reality. ~ Downton Abbey

What I see is a good man, m'lady. And they are not like buses. There won't be another one around in ten minutes time"

Anna Bates "Downton Abbey ~ Anna Bates "Downton Abbey"

I think the reason why people love 'Downton Abbey' is because all the characters are given the same weight. Some are nice, some are not, but it has nothing to do with class or oppressors versus the oppressed. ~ Julian Fellowes

People will consider me a part of their lives for however long 'Downton Abbey' lasts. It's a lovely thing to feel as an actor. ~ Michelle Dockery

The price of great love is great misery when one of you dies. ~ Julian Fellowes

I actually don't watch much TV, but my goal is to watch 'Downton Abbey.' I want to catch up on the series ... that's like my style. ~ Kelly Rutherford

I think people used to read 'War and Peace,' and now they don't; now they sit around with their tablets and watch 'Downton Abbey' and 'Breaking Bad' or whatever, and they want the things that they watch to be better so that they can feel better about themselves for watching it. ~ Noah Hawley

I have not watched WAGs World, I have not watched the BBC's Upstairs, Downstairs, either. It would be Downton Abbey, I think. ~ Theresa May

People talk about confidence without ever bringing up hard work. That's a mistake. I know I sound like some dour older spinster on Downton Abbey who has never felt a man's touch and whose heart has turned to stone, but I don't understand how you could have self-confidence if you don't do the work ... I have never, ever, ever, met a high confident person and successful person who is not what a movie would call a 'workaholic.' Because confidence is like respect; you have to earn it. ~ Mindy Kaling

For the last episode [of Downton Abbey], you'll need some handkerchiefs. I needed handkerchiefs reading it. It wasn't because it necessarily moved me while reading it, but it was the experience of reading it when I realized it was the last time I was ever going to be reading one of those scripts. That was quite terminal. ~ Hugh Bonneville

You have no idea what's going to happen [in Downton Abbey] until you get the script. We roughly knew a couple of the key points that were going to happen, but when I got the last episode, I turned to the last page to check that I was still alive. ~ Hugh Bonneville

'Downton Abbey' has become this huge thing, and I really enjoy the success of it, but I sometimes find myself on the outside looking in, which is sort of a healthy way to look at it so you don't get too caught up in it. ~ Michelle Dockery

She pursed her lips and nodded, swiveling around to continue her survey of my modest living space. Her arms were folded tightly across her chest as she strolled around. Letting out a long, deep breath, she dropped her hands to her sides when she reached my DVD collection.
"Downton Abbey?"
I jolted forward, clearing my throat. "Yeah, it's uh ... it's a good show. ~ Rachael Wade

My dad keeps joking about sneaking into my grandparents' house and switching out their HBO for PBS so they think I'm on 'Downton Abbey.' ~ Allison Williams

Working on 'Downton Abbey' is amazing, but there's an ensemble cast of between 18 and 21 actors. With 'Love Life,' there are two couples and a few other key characters. As a smaller unit, you've got to take more responsibility - at the same time, you can have more ownership of the direction it's going in. ~ Rob James-Collier

Brits are cool at the moment. We've taken over the world, what with 'Game of Thrones', 'Downton Abbey', One Direction ... to be British is to be fashionable. ~ Russell Tovey

The Americans think British T.V. shows are amazing, and everybody references 'Downton Abbey', and, in my genre, 'Doctor Who', which everyone is crazy for. People are always asking me and are always disappointed that I haven't been in it. ~ Jaime Murray

Sometimes a hard sacrifice must be made for a future that's worth having ~ Tom Branson

I've never seen an episode of 'Downton Abbey.' ~ Keeley Hawes

'Downton Abbey' about upper-class posh people: of course it is. ~ Phyllis Logan

Mary: "Don't be spiky, when I only want what you want – for you and Tony to walk into the sunset together."
Mabel: "Then why turn up looking like a cross between a Vogue fashion plate and a case of dynamite?"
Mary: "Well, I can't make it too easy for him. ~ Julian Fellowes

Between the action sequences, the pleasure lies in observing impeccably dressed Brits exchanging barbed witticisms - making it, basically, Downton Abbey with cyber crime and shower sex. ~ Karina Longworth

When I heard I had gotten 'Downton Abbey,' I remember I was standing on a freezing cold street in Manchester where we were shooting the Manchester part of 'West is West.' ~ Lesley Nicol

I do have a small collection of traditional SF ideas which I've never been able to sell. I'm known as a fantasy writer and neither my agent nor my editors want to risk my brand by jumping genre. ~ Lynn Abbey

I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature. ~ Edward Abbey

Except for the scale of the operation, there was nothing unusual about Hitler's massacre of the Jews. Genocide's an old tradition, as human as mother love or cherry pie. ~ Edward Abbey

Government should be weak, amateurish and ridiculous. At present, it fulfills only a third of the role. ~ Edward Abbey

Be loyal to what you love, be true to the earth, fight your enemies with passion and laughter. ~ Edward Abbey

What's your life philosophy, Leo?" "I haven't figured it out yet." Abbey considers this. "'I haven't figured it out yet' is not a bad life philosophy ~ Paul Acampora

In metaphysics, the notion that earth and all that's on it is a mental construct is the product of people who spend their lives inside rooms. It is an indoor philosophy. ~ Edward Abbey

The one thing ... that is truly ugly is the climate of hate and intimidation, created by a noisy few, which makes the decent majority reluctant to air in public their views on anything controversial ... Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all. ~ Edward Abbey

Commemorative stone in the floor of the Chapel of St. George in Westminster Abbey, London, dedicated in 1947: TO THE MEMORY OF ROBERT Baden-Powell CHIEF SCOUT OF THE WORLD 1857-1941 Upon one side of the stone was the badge of the Boy Scouts, the arrow-head to point the true way as it had pointed the way for sailors and navigators from the time of the earliest maps; and on the other the badge of the Girl Guides-the three-leafed clover. ~ Robert Baden-Powell

I thought of the wilderness we had left behind us, open to sea and sky, joyous in its plenitude and simplicity, perfect yet vulnerable, unaware of what is coming, defended by nothing, guarded by no one. ~ Edward Abbey

Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea; but a good writer is a critic of the society he lives in. ~ Edward Abbey

When riding my old Harley a ninety per at midnight down the Via Roma in Naples, I kept one consolation firmly in mind: If anything goes wrong, I'll never have time to regret it. ~ Edward Abbey

Christian theology: nothing so grotesque could possibly be true. ~ Edward Abbey

As between the skulking and furtive poacher, who hunts for the sake of meat, and the honest gentleman shooter, who kills for the pleasure of sport, I find the former a higher type of humanity. ~ Edward Abbey

No one can complain about earning good money, but for me, it's being able to help my family out, put my brother and sister through school, take my family on holiday. That's where I get the biggest buzz, not buying a pair of £500 shoes. ~ Abbey Clancy

[On Jane Austen] She was fully possessed of the idealism which is a necessary ingredient of the great satirist. If she criticized the institutions of earth, it was because she had very definite ideas regarding the institutions of heaven. ~ Rebecca West

How to pry the tourists out of their automobiles, out of their back-breaking upholstered mechanized wheelchairs and onto their feet, onto the strange warmth and solidity of Mother Earth again? This is the problem which the Park Service should confront directly, not evasively, and which it cannot resolve by simply submitting and conforming to the automobile habit. ~ Edward Abbey

We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism
a Mongoloid metaphysic. ~ Edward Abbey

Passion, sexual passion, may lead to marriage, but cannot sustain marriage. The purpose of marriage is the raising of children, for which patience, not passion, is the necessary foundation. ~ Edward Abbey

The city, which should be the symbol and center of civilization, can also be made to function as a concentration camp. This is one of the significant discoveries of contemporary political science. ~ Edward Abbey

Marvelously clear-fretted in the unsmoked air, the Abbey rose, silver-grey. It stood detached by the serenity of age from the ephemeral growths around it. It was solid on a foundation of centuries, destined, perhaps, for centuries yet to preserve within it the monuments to those whose work was now all destroyed. I did not loiter there. In years to come I expect some will go o look at the old Abbey with romantic melancholy. But romance of that kind is an alloy of tragedy with retrospect. I was too close. ~ John Wyndham

Poetry
even bad poetry
may be our final hope. ~ Edward Abbey

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California. ~ Edward Abbey

It is the difference between men and women, not the sameness, that creates the tension and the delight. ~ Edward Abbey

Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us-if only we were worthy of it. ~ Edward Abbey

Lou reluctantly drew back, still holding Joe, and placed his soft lips on Joe's own. Existence reacted to their reunion. Immediately, it was as if two halves became whole once again. The sky flashed colors overhead as they stood together: day to night, night to day. They stood motionless and kissing for so long a period that they might have been mistaken for part of the landscape, as vines climbed up their legs and grass grew around them; as dirt gathered and buried even more the scattered fragments of the abbey. Only the keepers of time knew that lifetimes did indeed pass, possibly entire eras. And yet it was but a scant moment to Joe and Lou. All of it but a simple, longed-for embrace neither time nor death could contain. ~ Eric Arvin

Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you. ~ Edward Abbey

Sure, we had to be skinny. I lived on Diet Coke and apples for two years. For the couture, we had to get up at 4 am to be sewn into the clothes and there was huge pressure to be thin. But I made a million dollars by the time I was 20, I bought a town house in Manhattan and put myself through Columbia. Does that make me a victim? ~ Abbey Lee Kershaw

We always used to think it didn't matter, that when you mined out one area, or farmed it out, or overgrazed it, you could move to new country beyond the hills, keep moving West. But there are no new places to go anymore. The land is full. We have to stay where we are, take care of what we have. There isn't going to be anything else. ~ Edward Abbey

But of the seven deadly sins, wrath is the healthiest - next only to lust. ~ Edward Abbey

But love of the wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need - if only we had eyes to see. ~ Edward Abbey

I was looking for the people who were making the music inside the cabinet. I would look in there and see if I could find somebody who was making all this wonderful music. ~ Abbey Lincoln

Surely it is no accident that the most thorough of tyrannies appeared in Europe's most thoroughly scientific and industrialized nation. If we allow our own country to become as densely populated, overdeveloped and technically unified as modern Germany we may face a similar fate. ~ Edward Abbey

I'm your other half. ( ... ) I'll carry your heartbeat in mine. ~ Jessica Verday

Tee Vee football: one team wins, one team loses
they tie
who cares? And why? ~ Edward Abbey

I understand and sympathize with the reasonable needs of a reasonable number of people on a finite continent. All life depends upon other life. But what is happening today, in North America, is not rational use but irrational massacre. Man the Pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a field of grain. ~ Edward Abbey

I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published. ~ Lynn Abbey

When a fine old carpet is eaten by mice, the colors and patterns of what's left behind do not change,' wrote my neighbor and friend, the poet Jane Hirschfield, after she visited an old friend suffering from Alzheimer's disease in a nursing home. And so it was with my father. His mind did not melt evenly into undistinguishable lumps, like a dissolving sand castle. It was ravaged selectively, like Tintern Abbey, the Cistercian monastery in northern Wales suppressed in 1531 by King Henry VIII in his split with the Church of Rome. Tintern was turned over to a nobleman, its stained-glass windows smashed, its roof tiles taken up and relaid in village houses. Holy artifacts were sold to passing tourists. Religious statues turned up in nearby gardens. At least one interior wall was dismantled to build a pigsty.

I've seen photographs of the remains that inspired Wordsworth: a Gothic skeleton, soaring and roofless, in a green hilly landscape. Grass grows in the transept. The vanished roof lets in light. The delicate stone tracery of its slim, arched quatrefoil windows opens onto green pastures where black-and-white cows graze. Its shape is beautiful, formal, and mysterious. After he developed dementia, my father was no longer useful to anybody. But in the shelter of his broken walls, my mother learned to balance her checkbook, and my heart melted and opened. Never would I wish upon my father the misery of his final years. But he was sacred in his ruin, and I took from it the ~ Katy Butler

Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it. ~ Edward Abbey

The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyong reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need, if only we had the eyes to see. ~ Edward Abbey

Phoenix, Arizona: an oasis of ugliness in the midst of a beautiful wasteland. ~ Edward Abbey