Rosamond Lehmann Quotes & Sayings

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

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

It's the thought that counts. — Rosamond Lehmann

There was sadness in everything - in the room, in the ringing bird-calls from the garden, in the lit, golden lawn beyond the window, with its single miraculous cherry-tree breaking in immaculate blossom and tossing long foamy sprays against the sky. She was sad to the verge of tears, and yet the sorrow was rich - a suffocating joy. — Rosamond Lehmann

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

Holidays, if you enjoy them, have no history. — Rosamond Lehmann

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

The present mood in which they sat relaxed was nothing more than the relief of two people coming back to a bombed building once familiar, shared as a dwelling, and finding all over the smashed foundations a rose-ash haze of willow herb. No more, no less. It is a ruin; but suspense at least, at least the need for sterile resolution, have evaporated with the fact of the return. Terror of nothingness contracts before the contemplation of it. It is not, after all, vacancy, but space; an area razed, roped off by time; by time refertilized, sown with a transfiguration, a ruin-haunting, ghost-spun No Man's crop of grace. — Rosamond Lehmann

Another five minutes, thought Olivia, and shut her eyes. Not to fall asleep again; but to go back as it were and do the thing gradually---detach oneself softly, float up serenely from the clinging delectable fringes. Oh, heavenly sleep! Why must one cast it from one, all unprepared, unwilling? Caught out again by Kate in the very act! You're not trying , you could wake up if you wanted to: that was their attitude. And regularly one began the day convicted of inferiority, of a sluggish voluptuous nature, seriously lacking in will-power. — Rosamond Lehmann

Convention is another name for the habits of society. — Rosamond Lehmann

It'll all come right. Because, of course, I do believe...I believe - I believe in everything...sun, moon, stars, in seasons - trees, flowers - people, music, life...yes, in life. — Rosamond Lehmann

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

The fact is, one shouldn't go to parties when one is in love. It makes one act aloof and superior and everyone distrusts you. — Rosamond Lehmann

I have decided to keep a record of my inmost real-self thoughts. Perhaps it will help me to find out what I really am like: horrid, I know: selfish, conceited, and material-minded. For instance, lately whenever I've tried to concentrate on anything serious or beautiful, I've started thinking about the Spencers' dance next week. I am ashamed of my pettiness. I'm going to try to do better this year
develop my character more and not always be thinking about enjoying myself. I've always been so happy, I dread disappointment and unhappiness, but they would be good for me. But I don't want them. — Rosamond Lehmann

I want to do something absolutely different, or perhaps nothing at all: just stay where I am, in my home, and absorb each hour, each day, and be alone; and read and think; and walk about the garden in the night; and wait, wait... — 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

Yes, we are sure of it. These walls enclose a world. Here is continuity spinning a web from room to room, from year to year. It is safe in this house. — Rosamond Lehmann

People have been saying the novel is dead for as far back as I can remember. The novel will never die, but it will keep changing and evolving and taking different shapes. Storytelling, which is the basis of the novel, has always existed and always will. — Rosamond Lehmann

The novel will never die, but it will keep changing and evolving and taking different shapes. — 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

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

Still, now and then they seemed to be holding behind them the surprising, the magic vistas of childhood - the sudden snow at night, whirling and furring without sound against the window; the full moon and all its shadows on the lawn; the Christmas sleigh and reindeer in the sky. — Rosamond Lehmann