Top 85 Quotes & Sayings by Phyllis Bottome - Page 2

to everything there is an end - except fear.

A man whose every exertion is bent upon showing up the flaws in his wife's character must be at least partially responsible for some of them.

The two best subjects for conversation are talking shop and making love.

There is no thermometer for wants!

with courage a human being is safe enough. And without it - he is never for one instant safe!

What are so mysterious as the eyes of a child?

Love comes into your being like a tidal wave ... sometimes it withdraws like a wave, till there isn't such a thing as a pool left, and every bit of your heart is as dry as seaweed beyond the wave's reach.

... can life be made undignified by any act of man?

... the ears of the hunted grow even keener than a hunter's.

Neither saints nor angels have ever increased my faith in this enigma Life; but what are called 'common men and women' have increased it.

death ... is not a great affair! Think - it happens once only - to each of us - as birth does. What do you know about being born? that - and no more - will you know about the act of death.

Every hen thinks she has laid the best egg! Can we not all believe as we choose? But the choice of others - what is that to us? Let them alone.

Personally, I think it's a good way to let a child start right in with the laws of Nature before he's old enough to be surprised at them.

... what most people tell you a confidence for is to get something off their chest which hasn't really been on it. They don't necessarily want to hide the truth from you, but they're out to hide it from themselves

... a woman who has been a nun is never anything else.

Curses are children of hate; they belong to the wrong family! Prayers are better than curses!

Some of us cling to our curses if we haven't anything better to cling to!

hurt vanity is one of the cruelest of mortal wounds.

If a writer is true to his characters they will give him his plot. Observations must play second fiddle to integrity.

A desire that has never been fulfilled is considerably less acute than one that has been fulfilled and then checked at the source.

it must depend as much upon the patient's willingness to be cured, as upon the physician's skill in curing. There is neither force not magic in psychiatry.

... most people are dead, and none of them seem to mind it. One hears a great many complaints about life, doesn't one? And there are people I know who would certainly grumble -- however dead they were -- if there were anything to grumble at.

A red-hot belief in eternal glory is probably the best antidote to human panic that there is.

Poets, when they write of love, give themselves and everyone else away!

It is you men who make war! ... We, who have children, would never make it! Why should a woman be broken up in pain, to give her child life, only to see him carried away from her, to make food for guns?