“ When I imagine changing places with her I get the feeling I do on finishing a novel with a brick-wall happy ending---I mean the kind of ending when you never think any more about the characters. Dodie Smith
“ I shouldn't think even millionaires could eat anything nicer than new bread and real butter and honey for tea. Dodie Smith
“ There was a wonderful atmosphere of gentle age, a smell of flowers and beeswax, sweet yet faintly sour and musty; a smell that makes you feel very tender towards the past. Dodie Smith
“ The family - that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to. Dodie Smith
“ ...[P]erhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return---that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness. Dodie Smith
“ All I really want to write about is what happened just before he left. But if I let myself start with that I might forget some of the things which came first. And every word he said is of deepest valu… Dodie Smith
“ Did you think of anything when Miss Marcy said Scoatney Hall was being re-opened? I thought of the beginning of Pride and Prejudice – where Mrs. Bennet says 'Netherfield Park is let a last.' And then… Dodie Smith
“ Rose doesn’t like the flat country, but I always did – flat country seems to give the sky such a chance. Dodie Smith
“ There is something revolting about the way girls' minds so often jump to marriage long before they jump to love. Dodie Smith
“ I have really sinned. I am going to pause now, and sit here on the mound repenting in deepest shame... Dodie Smith
“ But some characters in books are really real--Jane Austen's are; and I know those five Bennets at the opening of Pride and Prejudice, simply waiting to raven the young men at Netherfield Park, are not… Dodie Smith
“ Am I really admitting that my sister is determined to marry a man she has only seen once and doesn't much like the look of? It is half real and half pretense - and I have an idea that it is a game mos… Dodie Smith
“ Still, looking through the old volumes was soothing, because thinking of the past made the present seem a little less real. Dodie Smith
“ When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but… Dodie Smith
