109 Quotes by Nancy Mitford

As far as I am concerned, all reading is for pleasure.

If I had a girl I should say to her, 'Marry for love if you can, it won't last, but it is a very interesting experience and makes a good beginning in life. Later on, when you marry for money, for heaven's sake let it be big money. There are no other possible reasons for marrying at all.

Oh dear... it really is rather disillusioning. When one's friends marry for money they are wretched, when they marry for love it is worse. What is the proper thing to marry for, I should like to know?

... it is quite funny really when you think that probably I would have married him if he'd been at all clever about it. But instead of putting it to me as a sensible business proposition he would drag in all this talk about love the whole time, and I simply can't bear those showerings of sentimentality. Otherwise I should most likely have married him ages ago.

And I might offer you a little advice, Fanny, it would be to read fewer books, dear, and make your house slightly more comfortable. That is what a man appreciates in the long run.

The really important thing, if a marriage is to go well, without much love, is very very great niceness—gentillesse—and very good manners.

Sure enough, standing with their backs to the hall fire, were Aunt Sadie, Aunt Emily, and a small, fair, and apparently young man. My immediate impression was that he did not seem at all like a husband. He looked kind and gentle.

Friendship is something to be built up carefully, by people with leisure, it is an art, nature does not enter into it.

No thanks, darling,' said Héloïse. 'I'm not old enough to marry yet. But when I am grown up I'm going to be either a duchess like Mummy or a tart like Amabelle. Nothing in between for me. Only,' she added jauntily, 'there are rather few eligible dukes about so it almost looks as though –