85 Quotes by Katharine Whitehorn

Newish friends, if they get ghastly, can be weighed and found wanting, but you'd never do a thing like that to old ones; their terrible habits are just part of the universe.

Filing is concerned with the past; anything you actually need to see again has to do with the future.

[On the English climate:] People get a bad impression of it by continually trying to treat it as if it was a bank clerk, who ought to be on time on Tuesday next, instead of philosophically seeing it as a painter, who may do anything so long as you don't try to predict what.

One reason you are stricken when your parents die is that the audience you've been aiming at all your life - shocking it, pleasing it - has suddenly left the theater.

I just wish, when neither of us has written to my husband's mother, I didn't feel so much worse about it than he does.

[On Malcolm Muggeridge:] He thinks he was knocked off his horse by God, like St. Paul on the road to Damascus. His critics think he simply fell off it from old age.

The main purpose of children's parties is to remind you that there are children more awful than your own.

And what would happen to my illusion that I am a force for order in the home if I wasn't married to the only man north of the Tiber who is even untidier than I am?

I suppose we all share this pipe-dream of being able to reach out a hand and find anything at will; what is amazing is that we think that good filing could somehow make it comes true. On the contrary: putting a letter into a filing system is like releasing your ferret in the Hampton Court maze.