Dodie Smith

"Perhaps if I make myself write I shall find out what is wrong with me."

"I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring."

"Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression."

"When I imagine changing places with her I get the feeling I do on finishing a novel with a brick-wall happy ending---I mean the kind of ending when you never think any more about the characters."

"When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting"

"No, that was my privilege."

"That little glow of comfort lasted me right through the evening but was gone when I woke up next morning. Wakings are the worst times--almost before my eyes are open a great weight seems to roll on to my heart."

"...[P]erhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return---that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness."

"Only half a page left now. Shall I fill it with 'I love you, I love you'-- like father's page of cats on the mat? No. Even a broken heart doesn't warrant a waste of good paper."

"And who says you always have to understand things? You can like them without understanding them -- like 'em better sometimes."

"A thousand pounds for clothes--when on thinks how long poor people could live on it! When one thinks how long we could live on it, for that matter!"

"There was a wonderful atmosphere of gentle age, a smell of flowers and beeswax, sweet yet faintly sour and musty; a smell that makes you feel very tender towards the past."

"Oh, it was an artful place--it must make people who have money want to spend it madly!"

"My imagination longs to dash ahead and plan developments; but I have noticed that when things happen in one's imagination, they never happen in one's life."

"I am not so sure I should like the facts of life, but I have got over the bitter disappointment I felt when I first heard about them,..."

"The family - that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to."

"I suddenly knew that religion, God - something beyond everyday life - was there to be found, provided one is really willing. And I saw that though what I felt in the church was only imagination, it was a step on the way; because imagination itself can be a kind of willingness - a pretense that things are real, due to one's longing for them. It struck me that this was somehow tied up with what the Vicar said about religion being an extension of art - and then I had a glimpse of how religion can really cure you of sorrow; somehow make use of it, turn it to beauty, just as art can make sad things beautiful. I found myself saying: 'Sacrifice is the secret - you have to sacrifice things for art and it's the same with religion; and then the sacrifice turns out to be a gain.' Then I got confused and I couldn't hold on to what I meant - until Miss Blossom remarked: 'Nonsense, duckie - it's prefectly simple. You lose yourself in something beyond yourself and it's a lovely rest.'I saw that, all right. Then I thought: 'But that's how Miss Marcy cured her sorrow, too - only she lost herself in other people instead of in religion.' Which way of life was best - hers or the Vicar's? I decided that he loves God and merely likes the villagers, whereas she loves the villagers and merely likes God - and then I suddenly wondered if I could combine both ways, love God and my neighbor equally. Was I really willing to?"