Enid Bagnold Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

The theatre is a gross art, built in sweeps and overemphasis. Compromise is its second name.

Enid Bagnold
A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again.

Enid Bagnold
If death becomes cheap it is the watcher, not the dying, who is poisoned.

Enid Bagnold
Hanging head downwards between cliffs of bone, was the baby, its arms all but clasped about its neck, its face aslant upon its arms, hair painted upon its skull, closed, secret eyes, a diver poised in albumen, ancient and epic, shot with delicate spasms, as old as a Pharaoh in its tomb.

Enid Bagnold
The dangerous thing about hate is that it seems so reasonable.

Enid Bagnold
'You are like me!' The deepest flattery one creature pays its fellow, the cry which is uttered when another enters 'our country.'

Enid Bagnold
A dog needs God. It lives by your glances, your wishes. It even shares your humor. This happens about the fifth year. If it doesn't happen you are only keeping an animal.

Enid Bagnold
There may be wonder in money, but, dear God, there is money in wonder.

Enid Bagnold
The Press blew, the public stared, hands flew out like a million little fishes after bread.

Enid Bagnold
Isn't the fear of pain next brother to pain itself?

Enid Bagnold
Sex — the great inequality, the great miscalculator, the great Irritator.

Enid Bagnold
Marriage. The beginning and the end are wonderful. But the middle part is hell.

Enid Bagnold
After forty years of marriage we still stood with broken swords in our hands.

Enid Bagnold
Praise is the only thing that brings to life again a man that's been destroyed.

Enid Bagnold
Dead news like dead love has no phoenix in its ashes.

Enid Bagnold
One should not listen to what people say, only to what they mean, and she was one of those persons whose minds one must read for oneself, since her words so often deformed her thoughts.

Enid Bagnold
Let this serve as an axiom to every lover: A woman who refuses lunch refuses everything.

Enid Bagnold
When I look back on the pain of sex, the love like a wild fox so ready to bite, the antagonism that sits like a twin beside love, and contrast it with affection…of two people who have lived a life together (and of whom one must die) it's the affection I find richer. It's that I would have again. Not all those doubtful rainbow colors.

Enid Bagnold
He is dead: I am eighty. There's no arguing with either of us.

Enid Bagnold
Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To 'Why am I here?' To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Enid Bagnold
His tail ached with wagging, and even his hips waggled as he moved. But under cover of these virtues he was watchful for his benefit, watchful for human weakness, affected, a ready liar, disobedient, boastful, a sucker-up.

Enid Bagnold
I shall continue to explore — the astonishment of living!

Enid Bagnold
But I had been in love pretty often and I didn't think it stood the wear and tear.

Enid Bagnold
You will be old-fashioned one day. It's more shocking than getting old.

Enid Bagnold
At sixty-eight, it was very like love. I leave this remark on the page as a gift to women — that the incandescence can appear again in winter like a hibernated moth.

Enid Bagnold