Nancy Mitford Quotes

46 Sourced Quotes

I have only ever read one book in my life, and that is White Fang. It's so frightfully good I've never bothered to read another.

Nancy Mitford
An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off: it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.

Nancy Mitford
I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.

Nancy Mitford
Surely a King who loves pleasure is less dangerous than one who loves glory?

Nancy Mitford
To fall in love you have to be in the state of mind for it to take, like a disease.

Nancy Mitford
Ancestry has never counted much in England. The English lord knows himself to be such a very genuine article that, when looking for a wife, he can rise above such baubles as seize quartiers. Kind hearts, in his view, are more than coronets, and large tracts of town property more than Norman blood.

Nancy Mitford
'Twenty-three and a quarter minutes past,' Uncle Matthew was saying furiously, 'in precisely six and three-quarter minutes the damned fella will be late.'

Nancy Mitford
Aunt Sadie so much disliked hearing about health that people often took her for a Christian Scientist, which, indeed, she might have become had she not disliked hearing about religion even more.

Nancy Mitford
People in towns are always preoccupied. 'Have I missed the bus? Have I forgotten the potatoes? Can I get across the road?'

Nancy Mitford
Nothing about human beings ever had the power to move me as a child. Black Beauty now... !

Nancy Mitford
The test of a cook is how she boils an egg. My boiled eggs are fantastic, fabulous. Sometimes as hard as a 100 carat diamond, or again soft as a feather bed, or running like a cooling stream, they can also burst like fireworks from their shells and take on the look and rubbery texture of a baby octopus. Never a dull egg, with me.

Nancy Mitford
Always remember, children, that marriage is a very intimate relationship. It's not just sitting and chatting to a person; there are other things, you know.

Nancy Mitford
One thing about tourists is that it is very easy to get away from them. Like ants they follow a trail and a few yards each side of that trail there are none.

Nancy Mitford
Life itself, she thought, as she went upstairs to dress for dinner, was stranger than dreams and far, far more disordered.

Nancy Mitford
She said that all the sights in Rome were called after London cinemas.

Nancy Mitford
I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened.

Nancy Mitford
Most people like reading about what they already know — there is even a public for yesterday's weather.

Nancy Mitford
You've no idea how long life goes on and how many, many changes it brings. Young people seem to imagine that it's over in a flash, that they do this thing, or that thing, and then die, but I can assure you they are quite wrong.

Nancy Mitford
'Always be civil to the girls, you never know who they may marry' is an aphorism which has saved many an English spinster from being treated like an Indian widow.

Nancy Mitford
I am sometimes bored by people, but never by life.

Nancy Mitford
But I think she would have been happy with Fabrice,' I said. 'He was the great love of her life, you know.' Oh, dulling,' said my mother, sadly. 'One always thinks that. Every, every time.

Nancy Mitford
The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life's essential unfairness.

Nancy Mitford
I do love translating; it is the pure pleasure of writing without the misery of inventing.

Nancy Mitford
When the loo paper gets thicker and the writing paper thinner, it's always a bad sign, at home.

Nancy Mitford
If I had a girl I should say to her, 'Marry for love if you can, it won't last, but it is a very interesting experience and makes a good beginning in life. Later on, when you marry for money, for heaven's sake let it be big money. There are no other possible reasons for marrying at all.

Nancy Mitford
What is so nice & so unexpected about life is the way it improves as it goes along. I think you should impress this fact on your children because I think young people have an awful feeling that life is slipping past them & they must do something — catch something — they don't quite know what, whereas they've only got to wait & it all comes.

Nancy Mitford
In France that is the one rule, never make trouble.

Nancy Mitford
There are worse things than poverty, though I can't for the moment remember what they are.

Nancy Mitford
English doctors have killed 3/4 of my friends & the joke is the remaining 1/4 go on recommending them, so odd is human nature.

Nancy Mitford
Do you always laugh when you make love?' said Fabrice. I hadn't thought about it, but I suppose I do. I generally laugh when I'm happy and cry when I'm not. Do you find it odd?

Nancy Mitford