16 Quotes by Sybille Bedford

All food is the gift of the gods and has something of the miraculous, the egg no less than the truffle.

I write because I’m a writer. It is rather like cooking: to make something out of the raw material at hand.

A part, a large part, of traveling is an engagement of the ego v. the world. The world is hydra headed, as old as the rocks and as changing as the sea, enmeshed inextricably in its ways. The ego wants to arrive at places safely and on time.

She was also incapacitated by much of daily life and had ‘no aptitude whatsoever’ for domesticity.

A biographer is an artist under oath.

Dominion over his environment was supposed to be a hallmark of man. Now, that dominion is almost wholly vicarious, derived from the past ingenuity of others. In urban and industrial communities it is never direct, physical or spontaneous. Our implements are at twelve removes and we may all live to live inside so many Thermos flasks. It may be well to remember how to use a pair of sticks and a stone.

To remain monolingual reduces the mind to the confines of a tramline.