What is so nice & so unexpected about life is the way it improves as it goes along. I think you should impress this fact on your children because I think young people have an awful feeling that life is slipping past them & they must do something - catch something - they don't quite know what, whereas they've only got to wait & it all comes.

Nancy Mitford

Categorized in : Children Life Nice

I am sometimes bored by people, but never by life.

Nancy Mitford

bored sometimes people

I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened.

Nancy Mitford

hunting eggs thinking

To fall in love you have to be in the state of mind for it to take, like a disease.

Nancy Mitford

advice love fall

Life itself, she thought, as she went upstairs to dress for dinner, was stranger than dreams and far, far more disordered.

Nancy Mitford

dinner dream dresses

The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life's essential unfairness.

Nancy Mitford

life-lesson being-thankful family

If I had a girl I should say to her, 'Marry for love if you can, it won't last, but it is a very interesting experience and makes a good beginning in life. Later on, when you marry for money, for heaven's sake let it be big money. There are no other possible reasons for marrying at all.

Nancy Mitford

girl heaven interesting

the test of a cook is how she boils an egg. My boiled eggs are fantastic, fabulous. Sometimes as hard as a 100 carat diamond, or again soft as a feather bed, or running like a cooling stream, they can also burst like fireworks from their shells and take on the look and rubbery texture of a baby octopus. Never a dull egg, with me.

Nancy Mitford

running food baby

The trouble is that people seem to expect happiness in life. I can't imagine why; but they do. They are unhappy before they marry, and they imagine to themselves that the reason of their unhappiness will be removed when they are married.

Nancy Mitford

unhappy believe people

The worst of being a Communist is the parties you may go to are - well - awfully funny and touching but not very gay...I don't see the point of sad parties, do you? And Left-wing people are always sad because they mind dreadfully about their causes, and the causes are always going so badly.

Nancy Mitford

gay party wings

If one can't be happy, one must be amused.

Nancy Mitford

amused thought-provoking motivational

The English lord marries for love, and is rather inclined to love where money is; he rarely marries in order to improve his coat of arms.

Nancy Mitford

cynical lord

Sisters are a shield against life's cruel adversity.

Nancy Mitford

shields adversity

Life is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake, and here is one of them.

Nancy Mitford

cake sometimes dull

Spring came late, but when it came it was hand-in-hand with summer, and almost at once everything was baking and warm, and in the villages the people danced every night on concrete dancing floors under the plane trees.

Nancy Mitford

summer spring night

People in towns are always preoccupied. 'Have I missed the bus? Have I forgotten the potatoes? Can I get across the road?

Nancy Mitford

potatoes cities people

oh how television diminishes everything.

Nancy Mitford

diminish television

Paris in the early morning has a cheerful, bustling aspect, a promise of delicious things to come, a positive smell of coffee and croissants, quite peculiar to itself. The people welcome a new day as if they were certain of liking it, the shopkeepers pull up their blinds serene in the expectation of good trade, the workers go happily to their work, the people who have sat up all night in night-clubs go happily to their rest, the orchestra of motor-car horns, of clanking trams, of whistling policemen tunes up for the daily symphony, and everywhere is joy.

Nancy Mitford

coffee morning night

I do love translating; it is the pure pleasure of writing without the misery of inventing.

Nancy Mitford

misery pleasure writing

It's a funny thing that people are always ready to admit it if they've no talent for drawing or music, whereas everyone imagines that they themselves are capable of true love, which is a talent like any other, only far more rare.

Nancy Mitford

funny-things drawing people

Twice in her life she had mistaken something else for it; it was like seeing somebody in the street who you think is a friend, you whistle and wave and run after him, and it is not only not the friend, but not even very like him. A few minutes later the real friend appears in view, and then you can't imagine how you ever mistook that other person for him. Linda was now looking upon the authentic face of love, and she knew it, but it frightened her. That it should come so casually, so much by a series of accidents, was frightening.

Nancy Mitford

real running thinking