Rosamond Lehmann Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

How long, I wonder, will ignorance spell purity and knowledge shame?

Rosamond Lehmann
In a corner of the churchyard grew a plantation of white violets, enormously plump and prosperous-looking.... I saw the dead stretched out under me in the earth, feeding these flowers with a thin milk drawn from their bones.

Rosamond Lehmann
Never imagine that children who don't say, or ask, don't know.

Rosamond Lehmann
When two people unite, kindness must be mutual, or shocking things will happen.

Rosamond Lehmann
Looking back into childhood is like looking into a semi-transparent globe within which people and places lie embedded. A shake — and they stir, rise up, circle in inter-weaving groups, then settle down again.

Rosamond Lehmann
One should always act from one's inner sense of rhythm.

Rosamond Lehmann
One must have the humility and the imagination to honor all deep human experiences — not least those one has never come near to sharing.

Rosamond Lehmann
Advice to Young Journal Keepers. Be lenient with yourself. Conceal your worst faults, leave out your most shameful thoughts, actions, and temptations. Give yourself all the good and interesting qualities you want and haven't got. If you should die young, what comfort would it be to your relatives to read the truth and have to say: It is not a pearl we have lost, but a swine?

Rosamond Lehmann
Anything that becomes a cult, or a mass movement, loses its moral and spiritual value. The crusade has to be personal, individual. As soon as it becomes collective it loses its purpose.

Rosamond Lehmann
She went over to the mirror... glancing at herself sidelong, as women do who think they have lost their beauty; repudiating a complete reflection.

Rosamond Lehmann
But poetry is not to be lived, except for the few to whom it is more important than self-preservation.

Rosamond Lehmann
One can present people with opportunities. One cannot make them equal to them.

Rosamond Lehmann
The trouble with Ian [Fleming] is that he gets off with women because he can't get on with them.

Rosamond Lehmann