Stella Gibbons - Cold Comfort Farm (1932)

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The life of a journalist is poor, nasty, brutish and short. So is his style.

Stella Gibbons
Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm.

Stella Gibbons
And when April like an over-lustful lover leaped upon the lush flanks of the Downs there would be yet another child in the wretched hut down on Nettle Flitch Field, where Meriam housed the fruits of her shame.

Stella Gibbons
You have the most revolting Florence Nightingale complex,' said Mrs. Smiling. It is not that at all, and well you know it. On the whole, I dislike my fellow beings; I find them so difficult to understand. But I have a tidy mind and untidy lives irritate me. Also, they are uncivilized.

Stella Gibbons
One of the disadvantages of almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one's favorite writers. It gave one a curious feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one's dressing gown.

Stella Gibbons
On the whole, Flora liked it better when they were silent, though it did rather give her the feeling that she was acting in one of the less cheerful German highbrow films.

Stella Gibbons
Nature is all very well in her place, but she must not be allowed to make things untidy.

Stella Gibbons
There are some things (like first love and one's first reviews) at which a woman in her middle years does not care to look too closely.

Stella Gibbons
Curious how Love destroys every vestige of that politeness which the human race, in its years of evolution, has so painfully acquired.

Stella Gibbons
My idea of hell is a very large party in a cold room, where everybody has to play hockey properly.

Stella Gibbons
She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple.

Stella Gibbons
That would be delightful,' agreed Flora, thinking how nasty and boring it would be.

Stella Gibbons
Here was an occasion, she thought, for indulging in that deliberate rudeness which only persons with habitually good manners have the right to commit...

Stella Gibbons
A straight nose is a great help if one wishes to look serious'.

Stella Gibbons
Flora sighed. It was curious that persons who lived what the novelists called a rich emotional life always seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake.

Stella Gibbons
The farm was crouched on a bleak hillside, whence its fields, fanged with flints, dropped steeply to the village of Howling a mile away.

Stella Gibbons
Like all really strong-minded women, on whom everybody flops, she adored being bossed about. It was so restful.

Stella Gibbons
I do not object to the phenomena, but I do object to the parrot.

Stella Gibbons
He was, she reflected, almost rudely like a tortoise; and she was glad her friend kept none as pets or they might have suspected mockery.

Stella Gibbons
Flora inherited, however, from her father a strong will and from her mother a slender ankle. The one had not been impaired by always having her own way nor the other by the violent athletic sports in which she had been compelled to take part, but she realized that neither was adequate as an equipment for earning her keep.

Stella Gibbons
The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.

Stella Gibbons
Well,' said Mrs Smiling, 'it sounds an appalling place, but in a different way from all the others. I mean, it does sound interesting and appalling, while the others just sound appalling.

Stella Gibbons
Surely she had endured enough for one evening without having to listen to intelligent conversation?

Stella Gibbons
By god, D. H. Lawrence was right when he had said there must be a dumb, dark, dull, bitter belly-tension between a man and a woman, and how else could this be achieved save in the long monotony of marriage?

Stella Gibbons
... whereas there still lingers some absurd prejudice against living on one's friends, no limits are set, either by society or by one's own conscience, to the amount one may impose upon one's relatives.

Stella Gibbons