26 Quotes by Monica Dickens

When people are drunk the first time you meet them, you are inclined to think of them as permanent dipsomaniacs.

A decision loses its charm unless you can act on it immediately.

Life was like a jigsaw, but if you tried to fit the pieces together yourself, you generally got them wrong. Pierre had money; she needed money. Pierre was lovable and loved her; she would marry him. She had thought that was the pattern the pieces made. But it had been like trying to force two pieces together that didn’t fit, and then, suddenly, the jigsaw had been done, in quite a different way, by other hands.

It was with a shock of pitying surprise that she realized, in later years, that the grown-ups had missed the paradise which the children found so easily.

Doris was getting No. 4 ready for a new guest. The floor did not trouble her much, but she spent quite a long time on the taps and the veneered top of the dressing-table. Dusting and polishing she liked – things that showed – but those bits of fluff and dried mud at the bottom of the wardrobe she just pushed back into a corner. There was no means of getting them out, anyway, with that ridge at the front. Furniture was always made as inconvenient as possible. Doris was used to that.

Beyond the room, the night was lashing itself to an impotent fury of wind and rain. Mary thought how strange it was to think that only a few inches of wall separated the placid cosiness of the sitting-room from the howling, streaming darkness. Houses were very defiant things.

Christine had wanted to continue the conversation where she was, with the unappetising tray of dressings balanced on her hip. The most interesting things never cropped up when you were sitting comfortably in chairs. It was always in transient places like halls or staircases or bathroom doorways that the really important things started to be said and you had to discuss them then and there, because the mood was lost if you moved away to a more suitable place.

That often happens when you plan a story to tell someone, because while you are planning it you write all the dialogue yourself – theirs as well as yours – and then, of course, they don’t know their part.