Jessica Mitford Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

I have nothing against undertakers personally. It's just that I wouldn't want one to bury my sister.

Jessica Mitford
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There — a monarch, a dictator, a pope, a legislature — so decrees.

Jessica Mitford
Alas, poor Yorick! How surprised he would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged and neatly dressed - transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.

Jessica Mitford
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? Where, indeed. Many a badly stung survivor, faced with the aftermath of some relative's funeral, has ruefully concluded that the victory has been won hands down by a funeral establishment - in disastrously unequal battle.

Jessica Mitford
The character and mentality of the keepers may be of more importance in understanding prisons than the character and mentality of the kept.

Jessica Mitford
Growing up in the English countryside seemed an interminable process. Freezing winter gave way to frosty spring, which in turn merged into chilly summer-but nothing ever, ever happened.

Jessica Mitford
Society created the prison in its own image; will history, with its penchant for paradox, reverse those roles?

Jessica Mitford
Knowing few children of my age with whom to compare notes, I envied the children of literature to whom interesting things were always happening...

Jessica Mitford
Prison walls are meant not only to keep convicts in, but to keep the would-be investigator out.

Jessica Mitford
The prison system, inherently unjust and inhumane, is the ultimate expression of injustice and inhumanity in the society at large.

Jessica Mitford
We were like ill-assorted animals tied to a common tethering post.

Jessica Mitford
One is only really inwardly comfortable, so to speak, after one's life has assumed some sort of shape. Not just a routine, like studying or a job or being a housewife, but something more complete than all those, which would include goals set by oneself and a circle of life-time type friends. I think this is one of the hardest things to achieve, in fact often just trying doesn't achieve it but rather it seems to develop almost by accident.

Jessica Mitford
Those of us on the outside do not like to think of wardens and guards as our surrogates. Yet they are, and they are intimately locked in a deadly embrace with their human captives behind the prison walls. By extension so are we.

Jessica Mitford
Betty Friedan: Don't you hate women being treated as a sexual plaything?
Jessica Mitford: But Betty, you're not a plaything, you're a war toy!

Jessica Mitford
Lifelong enemies are, I think, as hard to make and as important to one's well-being as lifelong friends.

Jessica Mitford
A thirteen-year-old is a kaleidoscope of different personalities, if not in most ways a mere figment of her own imagination. At that age, what and who you are depends largely on what book you happen to be reading at the moment.

Jessica Mitford
O grave, where is thy victory? Where, indeed. Many a badly stung survivor, faced with the aftermath of some relative's funeral, has ruefully concluded that the victory has been won hands down by a funeral establishment.

Jessica Mitford
Enemies are, to me, as important as friends in my life, and when they die I mourn their passing.

Jessica Mitford
I discovered that Human Nature was not, as I had always supposed, a fixed and unalterable entity, that wars are not caused by a natural urge in men to fight, that ownership of land and factories is not necessarily the natural reward of greater wisdom and energy.

Jessica Mitford