Bilgewater Quotes

“The astounding thing about Paula is that she looks like Tess of the D´Urbervilles, and she sounds like Tess of the D´Urbervilles, and she thinks like Tess of the D´Urbervilles and yet she is so different from Tess of the D´Urbervilles. I expect she comes from a different part of Dorset.”

“He has not the faintest idea that I am ugly and we are very happy together.”

“I was seeing something I didn’t understand and did not want to. No I wasn’t. I was seeing something I had always understood and wanted to understand better.”

“In Yorkshire to be old-fashioned means to be fashioned-old, not necessarily to be out of date, but I think that I am probably both. For it is rather out of date, even though I will be eighteen this February, to have had a mother who died when one was born and it is to be fashioned-old to have the misfortune to be and look like me.”

“My name is Marigold, but to one and all because my father is very memorable and eccentric and had been around at the school for a very long time before I was born- was only Bill’s Daughter. Hence Bilgewater. Oh hilarity, hilarity! Bilgewater Green.”

“For if I am Bilgewater the Hideous, quaint and barmy, my father is certainly William the Silent.”

“I will tell you why they laugh at him: he is always falling in love. My mother was his first and apparently said then, no wonder for she was such a beauty.”

“She’s lovely, Paula. She has a grand straight back joining on to a long, duchess-like neck and whoosh of hair scooped into a silky high bundle with a pin. She’s tall, with a fine-drawn narrow figure with sloping shoulders and whatever she wears looks expensive.”

“And Paula never, ever, gives me the impression that I am ugly and once when I said something of the kind she went off like a bomb. ‘You get no sympathy from me on that score, my lover.‘”

“I was utterly content with the content of being in the right place at the right time. I, Marigold Green, a figure properly set in a picture, an equation on a page, a note in a bit of music, non-transposable, irreplaceable.”