I Capture The Castle Quotes & Sayings

My only stake was the hook I shot in the moon, trying to capture stardom on my way to heaven. Without bravado. Just footsteps plodding me along till my big show. My showstopper. The one where I landed in a place without gravity. — Juliet Castle

And who says you always have to understand things? You can like them without understanding them
like 'em better sometimes. — Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle

Topaz was wonderfully patient - but sometimes I wonder if it is not only patience, but also a faint resemblance to cows. — Dodie Smith

With stories even a page can take me hours, but the truth seems to flow out as fast as I can get it down. — Dodie Smith

But I can't see how anyone could believe that you killed the bear with a pitchfork,' I said.
'I didn't. I only wounded it - badly, I think, but not enough to put it out of action. It came blundering towards me, I stepped aside and it crashed head-first into the river - I could hear it threshing about in the darkness. I picked up a big stone - poor brute, I hated to do it but I had to finish it off. It gave just one groan as the stone hit it and then went down. I held the lantern high; I could see the bubbles coming up. And then I saw the dark bulk of it under the water, being carried along by the current.'
'But you didn't have a lantern,' I said.
'He didn't have a bear,' said Topaz. — Dodie Smith

When I was a kid, I just read and read. We were lucky enough to have gone to England and had a whole bunch of Penguin Puffins books, like The Land of Green Ginger by Noel Langley, which is hilarious. I would love to be able to write a book like that, but I don't know that I have a humorous bone in my body when it comes to writing. Once on a Time by A.A. Milne. I read a lot of old, old fantasy stuff. The Carbonelbooks by Barbara Sleigh. Then when I got a little older I loved Zilpha Keatley Snyder. I was a big fan of romance and when I got a little bit older I would read a Harlequin romance or a Georgette Heyer novel and then David Copperfield, and then another genre book and then Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy. I was that kind of reader. One book that I loved was I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. I loved voice and that book had it in spades. And then of course I grew into loving Jane Eyre. — Franny Billingsley

There was a wonderful atmosphere of gentle age, a smell of flowers and beeswax, sweet yet faintly sour and musty; a smell that makes you feel very tender towards the past. — Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle

That little glow of comfort lasted me right through the evening but was gone when I woke up next morning. Wakings are the worst times
almost before my eyes are open a great weight seems to roll on to my heart. — Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle

My imagination longs to dash ahead and plan developments; but I have noticed that when things happen in one's imagination, they never happen in one's life. — Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle

We burnt the salt and the herbs (in America it is correct to drop the h in herbs
it does sound odd.) — Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle

Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Johnny Got His Gun, A Farewell to Arms, A Prayer for Owen Meany, some years Wuthering Heights, Silas Marner, Their Eyes Were Watching God, or I Capture the Castle. Those books are like old friends. When — Gabrielle Zevin

Oh, I always employ shock tactics with men of genius," said Mrs. Cotton. "And one has to employ them in public or the men of genius bolt. — Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle

When I imagine changing places with her I get the feeling I do on finishing a novel with a brick-wall happy ending
I mean the kind of ending when you never think any more about the characters. — Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle

Oh, it was an artful place
it must make people who have money want to spend it madly! — Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle

I believe it is customary to get get one's washing over first in baths and bask afterwards; personally, I bask first. I have discovered that the first few minutes are the best and not to be wasted
my brain always seethes with ideas and life suddenly looks much better than it did ... So I bask first, wash second and then read as long as the hot water holds out. The last stage of a bath, when the water is cooling and there is nothing to look forward to, can be pretty disillusioning. — Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle

Perhaps he finds beauty saddening
I do myself sometimes. Once when I was quite little I asked father why this was and he explained that it was due to our knowledge of beauty's evanescence, which reminds us that we ourselves shall die. — Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle

You're the kind of child who might develop a passion for Bach.
I told him I hadn't at school. The one Bach piece I learnt made me feel I was being repeatedly hit on the head with a teaspoon. — Dodie Smith

She was so scared that she forgot to be a contralto. — Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle

And what happens to daughters whose mothers betray them? They don't become huggable like Sadie, Taiwo thinks. They don't become giggly, adorable like Ling. They grow shells. Become hardened. They stop being girls. Though they look like girls and act like girls and flirt like girls and kiss like girls - really, they're generals, commandos at war, riding out at first light to preempt further strikes. With an army behind them, their talents their horsemen, their brilliance and beauty and anything else they may have at their disposal dispatched into battle to capture the castle, to bring back the Honor. Of course it doesn't work. For they burn down the village in search of the safety they lost, every time, Taiwo knows. — Taiye Selasi

What is it about the English countryside
why is the beauty so much more than visual? Why does it touch one so? — Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle

This desire for solitude often overcomes her at house-cleaning times. — Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle

And they are like a drug, one needs them oftener and oftener and has to make them more and more exciting - until at last one's imagination won't work at all. — Dodie Smith

I don't want to miss anything. — Dodie Smith

A thousand pounds for clothes
when on thinks how long poor people could live on it! When one thinks how long we could live on it, for that matter! — Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle

I am not so sure I should like the facts of life, but I have got over the bitter disappointment I felt when I first heard about them, ... — Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle

[P]erhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return
that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness. — Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle

People's clothes ought to be buried with them ... They oughtn't to be left behind to be despised. — Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle

Wakings are the worst times
almost before my eyes are open a great weight seems to roll on my heart. — Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle

There was no way Baz was consciously mimicking the pose of the Howl's Moving Castle figurine, yet this was exactly what he was doing. Elijah's imagination completed the shadows into dark wings, but otherwise it was the same: shorter, hesitant Elijah standing before the taller, hunched, aching Baz, tentatively trying to capture his attention. — Heidi Cullinan

I think what I really mean is that [she] won't be WANTING things to happen. She will want things to say just as they are. She will never have the fun of hoping something wonderful and exciting may be just round the corner. — Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle