85 Quotes by Elizabeth Jane Howard

You can’t run from feelings, Charity. You have to face them. Otherwise your future will look just like your past.

For a single girl in London, luck isn’t always a glass slipper that fits. Sometimes luck is a splash of mud from a passing bus.

Laughter is just like champagne – only without the headache afterwards.

I’m not particularly keen on pity. Pity takes something away from grief. People think they’re sharing it, but really they’re just taking some. I prefer to keep my grief intact.

When you fall asleep after a big lunch you’re really just saving up energy to work off all the calories later on.

Sir Humphrey’s stories about Africa made Charity feel exactly like one of his stuffed trophy heads – lifeless and glassy eyed. The only difference was that she usually ended up face-down, slumbering on the sofa, instead of hung up on the wall.

The craze of genealogy is connected with the epidemic for divorce. If we can’t figure out who our living relatives are, then maybe we’ll have more luck with the dead ones.

Love is neither a conditional business nor an ever-fixed mark arrangement. People always know somewhere inside them if they are not loved. No gestures, talk, conciliation, pronouncements can prevail over that deep instinctual knowledge.

Charity groped for the phone, coming up with it at last and croaking “hello” in a voice that sounded exactly like a bullfrog’s mating call. Which made a kind of twisted sense – last night she’d been hunting for a mate as well.