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61 " It's better to oversleep and miss the boat than get up early and sink. "
― Elizabeth Jane Howard , Mr. Wrong
62 " Does breakfast in bed count as a morning workout? "
― Elizabeth Jane Howard
63 " Why can't they invent a pill that will keep you from remembering someone you don't want to remember? "
64 " Lady Margaret believed in the three D's: Discipline, Desire, and Determination. But as she listened dutifully to her new employer, hiding her yawns and trying to sit up extra straight in her chair, Charity Hill began thinking of all the lovely things that began with S, such as Sleeping Late, Sex, and Shopping. "
65 " She looked as though everything that she didn't like had happened to her. "
― Elizabeth Jane Howard , Marking Time (Cazalet Chronicles, #2)
66 " A good mystery keeps you up on Saturday night. A bad mystery puts you to sleep on Sunday afternoon. Either way, you come out ahead. "
67 " I've got lots of ambitions, but I only ever think of them when I'm lying around in my undies having a snooze. "
68 " Charity knew there was nothing more coarse and common than an afternoon in bed with a total stranger -- but the lad installing the telephone had a grin that made her heart turn flips. "
69 " It seemed awful that the only things she knew about him were those that made him miserable. "
― Elizabeth Jane Howard , Confusion (Cazalet Chronicles, #3)
70 " Charity groped for the phone, coming up with it at last and croaking "hello" in a voice that sounded exactly like a bullfrog's mating call. Which made a kind of twisted sense -- last night she'd been hunting for a mate as well. "
71 " Charity could chatter dorm-room Marxist theory with the best of them, but a single look from cool, silver-haired Lady Beddington was enough to make her tremble from head to toe. "
72 " It was foolish to indulge in elaborate preconceptions: anticipation was a featherweight, doomed to compete with the inevitable, convincing bulk of reality. The trouble was that one had to face reality without knowing beforehand precisely what it was to be. One had somehow to discover and tread the hard, between the sloughs of fearing the worst and hoping for the best. "
― Elizabeth Jane Howard , The Long View
73 " The effort of trying to turn grief into regret, to live entirely on past nourishment, even to keep the sharper parts of nostalgia credible (he found himself beginning to doubt and struggle with the intricacies of the smaller memories), and, most of all, the fearful absence of anything that could begin to take their place, had worn him down. "
― Elizabeth Jane Howard , Casting Off (Cazalet Chronicles, #4)
74 " Love is neither a conditional business nor an ever-fixed mark arrangement. People always know somewhere inside them if they are not loved. No gestures, talk, conciliation, pronouncements can prevail over that deep instinctual knowledge. "
75 " Men will consider deeply before they buy a tie or choose a meal; but when it comes to throwing aside their purpose in life, possibly life itself, they do not think at all. They consent to be marshalled, controlled, exposed to unimagined shock, mutilation and death, with barely a tremor, and their reasons for complying, if indeed they have any, would comparen most shamefully with their reasons for doing anything else. "
76 " Mrs Downs, a large sad lady who described herself, to Rupert’s delight, as bulky but fragile, now came four mornings a week to clean the house. She was one of those people who habitually looked on the black side of everything with a cheerfulness that bordered upon the macabre. "
77 " Seafang "
― Elizabeth Jane Howard , The Light Years (Cazalet Chronicles, #1)
78 " Aunt Zoë gave her a pot of Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Cream. ‘Put it on your mouth at night,’ she said. ‘It’s wonderful for stopping chapped lips. "
79 " In a way, an autobiography seems to me like a household book ofaccounts – what has been acquired, to what purpose has it been put,was too much paid for it and did it teach you anything? How muchhas been learned by experience? Have I discovered where I am usefuland useless, how I am nourished and starved? "
80 " since dawn and was utterly exhausted with efforts to make the squash court a place in which people could not only sleep, but keep their personal effects. The cooking had proved extremely difficult, as the kitchen utensils from Mill Farm had been moved to Pear Tree Cottage, and the Babies’ Hotel equipment – brought down in a Cazalet lorry – had lost its way and did not turn up until nine in the evening. They had to make the meal at Pear Tree Cottage and Villy took it down with them in a car. This meant cooking under the almost offensively patronising eye of Emily, whose view of ladies and their children was, of course, that they couldn’t boil an egg to save their lives; she was also unwilling to tell them where anything was on the twofold grounds that she didn’t know whether she was on her head or her heels with all the upset, and didn’t want them using her things anyway. Louise had to admit that Nora was wonderfully tactful and apparently insensitive to slights. They made two huge shepherd’s pies and Louise a batch of real Bath buns because she had just learned how to do them and was particularly good at it. The supper had been most gratefully received and Matron had called them two little bricks. Babies could be heard crying as they reached the house. Nora said that they "