Sybille Bedford Quotes & Sayings

Public opinion, the sum of private opinions, does matter, can matter often for good. — Sybille Bedford

To remain monolingual reduces the mind to the confines of a tramline. — Sybille Bedford

What I learnt came to me . . . at second and at third hand, in chunks and puzzles, degrees and flashes. — Sybille Bedford

All wealth is relative; and so is its absence. — Sybille Bedford

I write because I'm a writer. It is rather like cooking: to make something out of the raw material at hand. — Sybille Bedford

One does odd things. You see, when one's young one doesn't feel part of it yet, the human condition; one does things because they are not "for good"; one thinks everything is a rehearsal - to be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance. — Sybille Bedford

Guillermo was lonely and serviceable and always rushed in to do the things one wanted in a way one did not want them done. — Sybille Bedford

In Europe, where human relations like clothes are supposed to last, one's got to be wearable. In France one has to be interesting, in Italy pleasant, in England one has to fit. — Sybille Bedford

She was also incapacitated by much of daily life and had 'no aptitude whatsoever' for domesticity. — Sybille Bedford

The future of human society. Had it made an irrevocably false start? The compass error that gets harder to correct with every mile you go? — Sybille Bedford

A part, a large part, of traveling is an engagement of the ego v. the world. The world is hydra headed, as old as the rocks and as changing as the sea, enmeshed inextricably in its ways. The ego wants to arrive at places safely and on time. — Sybille Bedford

It would seem that in history it's never a tooth for a tooth, but a thousand, a hundred thousand for one. — Sybille Bedford

All food is the gift of the gods and has something of the miraculous, the egg no less than the truffle. — Sybille Bedford

I detest ... anything over-cooked, over-herbed, over-sauced, over elaborate. Nothing can go very far wrong at table as long as there is honest bread, butter, olive oil, a generous spirit, lively appetites and attention to what we are eating. — Sybille Bedford