Top 120 Dodie Smith Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The family – that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to.”

— Dodie Smith

2. “Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you even more than suffering yourself can.”

— Dodie Smith

3. “What is it about the English countryside – why is the beauty so much more than visual? Why does it touch one so?”

— Dodie Smith

4. “Truthfulness so often goes with ruthlessness.”

— Dodie Smith

5. “Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.”

— Dodie Smith

6. “Why is summer mist romantic and autumn mist just sad?”

— Dodie Smith

7. “I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness.”

— Dodie Smith

8. “When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it – or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don’t suppose many people try to do it.”

— Dodie Smith

Featured in: Reading Quotes

9. “My hand is very tired but I want to go on writing. I keep resting and thinking. All day I have been two people – the me imprisoned in yesterday and the me out here on the mound; and now there is a third me trying to get in – the me in what is going to happen next.”

— Dodie Smith

10. “Contemplation seems to be about the only luxury that costs nothing.”

— Dodie Smith

11. “The Devil’s out of fashion.”

— Dodie Smith

12. “And who says you always have to understand things? You can like them without understanding them – like ’em better sometimes.”

— Dodie Smith

13. “If you love people, you take them on trust.”

— Dodie Smith

14. “It is rather exciting to write by moonlight.”

— Dodie Smith

15. “I suppose the best kind of spring morning is the best weather God has to offer.”

— Dodie Smith

16. “I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring.”

— Dodie Smith

17. “We lose more women to marriage than war, famine, and disease.”

— Dodie Smith

18. “Only the margin left to write on now. I love you, I love you, I love you.”

— Dodie Smith

19. “It came to me that Hyde Park has never belonged to London – that it has always been, in spirit, a stretch of countryside; and that it links the Londons of all periods together most magically – by remaining forever unchanged at the heart of a ever-changing town.”

— Dodie Smith

20. “Ah, but you’re the insidious type – Jane Eyre with of touch of Becky Sharp. A thoroughly dangerous girl.”

— Dodie Smith

21. “It is the still, yellow kind of afternoon when one is apt to get stuck in a dream if one sits very quiet.”

— Dodie Smith

22. “Stew’s so comforting on a rainy day.”

— Dodie Smith

23. “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”

— Dodie Smith

24. “Even a broken heart doesn’t warrant a waste of good paper.”

— Dodie Smith

25. “I shouldn’t think even millionaires could eat anything nicer than new bread and real butter and honey for tea.”

— Dodie Smith

26. “Just to be in love seemed the most blissful luxury I had ever known. The thought came to me that perhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return – that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness. For a moment I felt that I had discovered a great truth.”

— Dodie Smith

27. “Sacrifice is the secret – you have to sacrifice things for art and it’s the same with religion; and then the sacrifice turns out to be a gain.” Then I got confused and I couldn’t hold on to what I meant – until Miss Blossom remarked: “Nonsense, duckie – it’s perfectly simple. You lose yourself in something beyond yourself and it’s a lovely rest.”

— Dodie Smith

28. “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

29. “Topaz was wonderfully patient – but sometimes I wonder if it is not only patience, but also a faint resemblance to cows.”

— Dodie Smith

30. “Time takes the ugliness and horror out of death and turns it into beauty.”

— Dodie Smith

31. “Still, looking through the old volumes was soothing, because thinking of the past made the present seem a little less real.”

— Dodie Smith

32. “I wonder if there isn’t a catch about having plenty of money? Does it eventually take the pleasure out of things?”

— Dodie Smith

33. “I could marry the Devil himself if he had some money.”

— Dodie Smith

34. “I like seeing people when they can’t see me.”

— Dodie Smith

35. “How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel!”

— Dodie Smith

36. “Like many other much-loved humans, they believed that they owned their dogs, instead of realizing that their dogs owned them.”

— Dodie Smith

37. “Thinking of death – strange, beautiful, terrible and a long way off – made me feel happier than ever.”

— Dodie Smith

38. “Cruel blows of fate call for extreme kindness in the family circle.”

— Dodie Smith

39. “Perhaps if I make myself write I shall find out what is wrong with me.”

— Dodie Smith

40. “Your pain and anger will pass, but the guilt would remain with you for always.”

— Dodie Smith

41. “Death is too much to ask of the living.”

— Dodie Smith

42. “What a tiny list of friends I have! All my fault. I less and less want to see people.”

— Dodie Smith

43. “I know all about the facts of life, and I don’t think much of them.”

— Dodie Smith

44. “I should rather like to tear these last pages out of the book. Shall I? No-a journal ought not to cheat.”

— Dodie Smith

45. “Ham with mustard is a meal of glory.”

— Dodie Smith

46. “It’s odd how different a house feels when one is alone in it. It makes it easier to think rather private thoughts...”

— Dodie Smith

47. “I could hear rain still pouring from the gutters and a thin branch scraping against one of the windows; but the church seemed completely cut off from the restless day outside – just as I felt cut off from the church. I thought: I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness.”

— Dodie Smith

48. “So many of the loveliest things in England are melancholy.”

— Dodie Smith

49. “Oh, it is wonderful to wake up in the morning with things to look forward to!”

— Dodie Smith

50. “At least we’re companions in misfortune.”

— Dodie Smith