To care passionately for another human creature brings always more sorrow than joy; but at the same time, Elinor, one would not be without experience. Anyone who has never really loved has never really lived...
The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.
Tea! Bless ordinary everyday afternoon tea!
Time is the best killer.
Never go back to a place where you have been happy. Until you do it remains alive for you. If you go back it will be destroyed.
Many homicidal lunatics are very quiet, unassuming people. Delightful fellows.
If you confront anyone who has lied with the truth, he will usually admit it – often out of sheer surprise. It is only necessary to guess right to produce your effect.
It’s astonishing in this world how things don’t turn out at all the way you expect them to.
If I were at any time to set out on a career of deceit, it would be of Miss Marple that I should be afraid.
We owe most of our great inventions and most of the achievements of genius to idleness either enforced or voluntary.
One does what one can, not what one cannot.
Don’t think. That is the wrong way to bring anything back. Let it go. Sooner or later it will flash into your mind.
Of course I despise money when I haven’t got any. It’s the only dignified thing to do.
There are doubtless certain unworldly people who are indifferent to money. I myself have never met one.
Those who never think of money need a great deal of it.
The out-of-date returns in due course as the picturesque.
Nurses – nurses, you’m all the same. Full of cheerfulness over other people’s troubles.
The tragedy of life is that people do not change.
The whole thing was like a nine-month ocean voyage to which you never got acclimatized.
Everything has got its right size. When it is its right size and well run it’s the tops.