Best Of Dorothy Whipple's "Someone at a Distance"
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple
She was used to feeling bitter; there was something stimulating about bitterness, but sadness was insupportable.
p.100
He wasn't much given to speculation about people. Unlike his wife, who jumped to conclusions or pursued eager inquiry, Avery didn't bother. People usually revealed themselves in time for what they were, and he left them to it.
p.110
He was as remote as a young god.
p.133
A moment like that was better for the looks than any beauty-treatment in the world.
p.139
Madame Piquet was just telling me only the other day that grandchildren are a woman's greatest happiness. Just pure pleasure without any anxiety.
p.144
Homes, like people, died. This had been a cheerful, comfortable, beloved house but now it was dead, and they were trying to dismember it as quickly as possible and finish with it.
p.158
A loved husband is the companion of companions, the supreme sharer, and a happy wife often sounds trivial when she is really sampling and enjoying their mutual and unique confidence. But in doing it, she largely loses her power of independent decision and action. She either brings her husband round to her way of thinking or goes over to his, and mostly she doesn't know or care which it is.
p.211
Men liked youth in women. They felt entitled to it.
p.230
A family is like a jigsaw puzzle. If a piece is lost, the rest no longer makes a pattern.
p.254
You might be bored in foreign places, but it made a cosmopolitan of you to have been to them.
p.322
She always gave as much pleasure to her own eyes as to any others. More, in fact, because she alone knew what perfect finish she had achieved.
p.323
I have the start of faith, but I never seem to grow in it.
p.346
These women were old, time had softened them, they had learnt something from loss, helplessness, loneliness; they knew that almost anything can happen to anybody. They were kinder than when they were young.
p.359
His relief was so great that it dissolved all adult reserve.
p.362
She made tea for herself and opened a book on Albert Schweitzer. She deliberately put herself in touch with greatness. She read first with determination and then with absorption.
p.373
She had learnt to wait for the changes and the help that life brings. Life is like the sea, sometimes you are in the trough of the wave, sometimes on the crest. When you are in the trough, you wait for the crest, and always, trough or crest, a mysterious tide bears you forward to an unseen, but certain shore.
p.413
