Best 29 quotes of Elizabeth Jane Howard on MyQuotes

A rainy day is like a lovely gift -- you can sleep late and not feel guilty.

Charity groped for the phone, coming up with it at last and croaking "hello" in a voice that sounded exactly like a bullfrog's mating call. Which made a kind of twisted sense - last night she'd been hunting for a mate as well.

Does breakfast in bed count as a morning workout?

For a single girl in London, luck isn't always a glass slipper that fits. Sometimes luck is a splash of mud from a passing bus.

Holidays were invented so single women could overeat without feeling guilty.

I'm not lazy. I'm just really gifted, only instead of being good at music or math I'm good at sleeping late.

I'm not particularly keen on pity. Pity takes something away from grief. People think they're sharing it, but really they're just taking some. I prefer to keep my grief intact.

It's better to oversleep and miss the boat than get up early and sink.

Sex is like petrol. It's a galvaniser, a wonderful fuel for starting a relationship.

The craze of genealogy is connected with the epidemic for divorce. If we can't figure out who our living relatives are, then maybe we'll have more luck with the dead ones.

When you fall asleep after a big lunch you're really just saving up energy to work off all the calories later on.

You can't run from feelings, Charity. You have to face them. Otherwise your future will look just like your past.

But over the years, of pain and distaste for what her mother had once called 'the horrible side of married life', of lonely days filled with aimless pursuits or downright boredom, of pregnancies, nurses, servants and the ordering of endless meals, it had come to seem as though she had given up of everything for not very much. She had journeyed towards this conclusion by stages hardly perceptible to herself, disguising discontent with some new activity which, as she was a perfectionist, would quickly absorb her. But when she had mastered the art, or the craft, or the technique involved in whatever it was, she realised that her boredom was intact and was simply waiting for her to stop playing with a loom, a musical instrument, a philosophy, a language, a charity or a sport and return to recognising the essential futility of her life. Then, bereft of distracton, she would relapse into a kind of despair as each pursuit betrayed her, failing to provide the raison d'être that had been her reason for taking it up in the first place.

Charity felt crumpled and wrung out after her cry, like a sponge that had gone through a week of dishes. Of course Lady Beddington said things would be better in the morning, after a good night's sleep. Charity found it was a struggle to believe her; but then it was a struggle just keeping her eyes open. By the time the guest room was ready, Charity was sprawled out face-downwards on the sofa, sound asleep, her tears already forgotten. And that's what it means to be young, Lady Beddington thought, smiling.

Charity felt rather snoozy after the long sermon, and she was really very grateful when Reverend Meeps offered her a cup of tea. Church was not so bad when the minister remembered you were only human.

Charity knew she had to begin looking for a job soon. Definitely tomorrow, or the next day. Or perhaps the day after that. Charity didn't believe in procrastination. She just needed to plan her strategy. She was sound asleep on the sofa when Lady Margaret got back from London.

Charity knew that she had to be up early in the morning. And she knew that a weepy, silly, ridiculously old-fashioned love story was not the thing to watch with a broken heart. Nevertheless, she watched. And wept. And was still smiling when she fell asleep at three o'clock in the morning, with the remote in her hand and the telly still going.

Giving the rugged repairman the eye was one thing -- but Charity had no intention of snogging away a whole rainy afternoon when she was supposed to be catching up on her work. Lady Margaret was counting on her! But then again, Lady Margaret didn't have big brown eyes and a cheeky grin.

It's all right, darling. I can't stand people who are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at seven in the morning. Give me a girl who only gets going after ten!

Now he must get back to Margaret. In the old days, he used to come home full of tales about deliveries, excited, even exalted by having witnessed the same old miracle. But after they lost both their sons in the war, she couldn't stand to hear about any of that and he kept it to himself. She had become a shadow, acquiescent, passive, full of humdrum little remarks about the house and the weather and how hard he was on his clothes, and then he'd bought her a puppy, and she talked endlessly about that. It had become a fat spoiled dog, and still she talked about it as though it were a puppy. It was all he could think to do for her, as his grief had never been allowed to be on par with hers. He kept that to himself as well. But when he was alone in the car like this, and with a drop of whisky inside him, he thought about Ian and Donald who were never spoken of at home, who would, he felt, be entirely forgotten except for his own memory and their names on the village monument.

Sir Humphrey looked like a sleepy old hippo -- and when he yawned in that big, big, hippopotamus way Charity couldn't help doing likewise.

Sir Humphrey's stories about Africa made Charity feel exactly like one of his stuffed trophy heads -- lifeless and glassy eyed. The only difference was that she usually ended up face-down, slumbering on the sofa, instead of hung up on the wall.

Some girls have a real sexy giggle, but whenever I laugh it always comes out somewhere between a bellow and a snort!

The real point of watching television is to forget that you have a brain.

Wandering down the street in an aimless sort of way, cold too, in a dress from last night that made young men stop and stare in the street, Charity Hill found herself hating the single life for the very first time.

When she was drinking his liquor and smoking his cigars, Charity couldn't help warming to Sir Humphrey. She almost forgot what a crashing bore he really was.

Why do these big old country houses always have family portraits in the dining room? Do you really want to eat with someone's gloomy great-grandfather looking down on you?

Why do they call them daytime dramas, anyway? Shouldn't they be bedtime dramas? All anyone ever talks about is getting someone into bed! Plus if you're at home watching, you're probably watching in bed. And if you're like me, after an hour or two of watching all those sexy goings-on you forget the silly story entirely and fall asleep. Just like it's bedtime!

You can't oversleep if you don't make plans to wake up early.