Jane Gardam Quotes

“I ought to tell you at the beginning that I am not quite normal, having had a violent experience at the age of nine. I will make this clear at once because I have noticed that if things seep out slowly through a book the reader is apt to feel let down or tricked in some way when he eventually gets the point.”

“When the war is over, Hitler will be dead, He hopes to go to Heaven with a halo on his head, But the Lord said no, You’ll have to go below, There’s only room for Churchill, So cheery-cheery oh!”

“Jessica Vye you are a writer beyond all possible doubt!”

“1. I am not quite normal 2. I am not very popular 3. I am able to tell what people are thinking. And I might add 4. I am terribly bad at keeping quiet when I have something on my mind because 5. I ABSOLUTELY ALWAYS AND INVARIABLY TELL THE TRUTH.”

“I’m going to give you a very good rule that was given to me a college and I have always been abundantly grateful for it. When you have written something that you think is really good, destroy it. Destroy it.”

“It isn’t my stomach. It’s my essay. It’s a good essay. I know it’s a good essay. She said it was awful and I was too pleased with myself. She said it was a lie. I called her a fool.”

“She has narrow hands and a narrow face, Helen Bell. She is good at playing the piano. On the whole I don’t like people who are always playing the piano. They have mean little mouths.”

“If there is anyone here this afternoon whom I have convinced that books are meant to be enjoyed, that English is nothing to do with duty, that it has nothing to do with school- with exercises and homework and ticks and crosses- then I am a happy man.”

″‘Mr. Hanger,’ she said, ‘we feel that you are one of our very oldest friends.’ Everyone clapped like mad and biffed everyone else’s knee and pushed at everyone else’s elbow and snuffled, though keeping straight faces because of course NOBODY had ever heard of the man before except I suppose the Headmistress.”

“English is what matters. ENGLISH IS LIFE.”

“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.”