Top 40 Helen Simonson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You cannot run away from what’s in your heart.”

— Helen Simonson

2. “We are all small-minded people, creeping about the earth grubbing for our own advantage and making the very mistakes for which we want to humiliate our neighbors.”

— Helen Simonson

3. “Passion is all very well, but it wouldn’t do to spill the tea.”

— Helen Simonson

4. “Only sometimes when we pick and choose among the rules we discover later that we have set aside something precious in the process.”

— Helen Simonson

5. “The world is full of small ignorances. We must all do our best to ignore them and thereby keep them small, don’t you think.”

— Helen Simonson

6. “It was the cheapest kind of rebuke, to call a woman ugly, but one to which small boys and grown men seemed equally quick to stoop when feeling challenged.”

— Helen Simonson

7. “I’m pretty sure wars would be shorter if we weren’t all so eager to read about them.”

— Helen Simonson

8. “I said we would be informal,” said Agatha. “I did not say we would be eccentric.”

— Helen Simonson

9. “So he dreams himself the life he cannot have?” “Exactly. But we, who can do anything, we refuse to live our dreams on the basis that they are not practical. So tell me, who is to be pitied more?”

— Helen Simonson

10. “Life does often get in the way of one’s reading.”

— Helen Simonson

11. “Is it that our needs grew smaller?” asked Hugh. “Or is it just that the fear and deprivation makes one appreciate simple things more?” “I think our ability to be happy gets covered up by the years of petty rubbing along in the world, the getting ahead,” said Daniel. “But war burns away all the years of decay, like an old penny dropped into vinegar.”

— Helen Simonson

12. “He was struck by the thought that he was often lonely, even in the midst of many friends.”

— Helen Simonson

13. “Humiliation is the sport of the petty.”

— Helen Simonson

14. “Those birds perform a miracle every morning and the world ought to get up and listen.”

— Helen Simonson

15. “But if all else fails, I can always write her a sonnet.” “A sonnet?” said Hugh. “No woman can resist having her name rhymed with a flower in iambic pentameter,” said Daniel.”

— Helen Simonson

16. “Her favourite summer memories were not of events themselves, of picnics, sea bathing, tennis afternoons and cricket matches, but of watching Hugh and Daniel enjoying them and locking into memory the delight in their faces and their open laughter.”

— Helen Simonson

17. “I later realized that this is my view of passion: It is rooted in genuine friendship. Chemistry may be two strangers exchanging smoldering looks – but passion has to be able to survive at least a twenty-minute conversation!”

— Helen Simonson

18. “There is nothing more corrosive to character than money.”

— Helen Simonson

19. “It surprised him that his grief was sharper than in the past few days. He had forgotten that grief does not decline in a straight line or along a slow curve like a graph in a child’s math book. Instead, it was almost as if his body contained a big pile of garden rubbish full both of heavy lumps of dirt and of sharp thorny brush that would stab him when he least expected it.”

— Helen Simonson

20. “It was never a good idea to confide in people. They always remembered, and when they came up to you in the street, years later, you could see the information was still firmly attached to your face and present in the way they said your name and the pressure of their hand clasping yours.”

— Helen Simonson

21. “Memories were like tomb paintings, thought the Major, the colors still vivid no matter how many layers of mud and sand time deposited. Scrape at them and they come up all red and blazing.”

— Helen Simonson

22. “War does have a way of interfering with one’s most closely held desires.”

— Helen Simonson

23. “The age of great men, when a single mind of intelligence and vision might change the destiny of the world, was long gone.”

— Helen Simonson

24. “We all pick and choose and make our religion our own, do we not?”

— Helen Simonson

25. “He cursed himself for having assumed the weather would be sunny. Perhaps it was the result of evolution, he thought – some adaptive gene that allowed the English to go on making blithe outdoor plans in the face of almost certain rain.”

— Helen Simonson

26. “There is only the passionate spark. Without it, two people living together may be lonelier than if they lived quite alone.”

— Helen Simonson

27. “Most of all I remember that what begins with drums and fife, flags and bunting, becomes too swiftly a long and grey winter of the spirit.”

— Helen Simonson

28. “The Major wished young men wouldn’t think so much. It always seemed to result in absurd revolutionary movements or, as in the case of several of his former pupils, the production of very bad poetry.”

— Helen Simonson

29. “Oh, it’s simple pragmatism, Dad. It’s called the real world. If we refused to do business with the morally questionable, the deal volume would drop in half and the good guys like us would end up poor. Then where would we all be?” said Roger. “On a nice dry spit of land know as the moral high ground?” suggested the Major.”

— Helen Simonson

30. “It also occurred to him that perhaps this only meant that the less he saw of people, the more kindly he felt toward them, and that this might explain his current mild exasperation with his many condolence-offering acquaintances.”

— Helen Simonson

31. “While the lake lapped at their feet and the mountains absorbed their calls and the sky flung its blue parachute over their heads, he thought how wonderful it was that life was, after all, more simple than he had ever imagined.”

— Helen Simonson

32. “They sat a moment in embrace of silent mutual comfort, which was, she often thought, the reward of those long married.”

— Helen Simonson

33. “Despite his attempts to maintain a vigorous structure of errands, golf games, visits, and meetings, there were sometimes days like this one, filled with rain and touched with a gnawing sense of parts missing from life. When the slick mud ran in the flower beds and the clouds smothered the light, he missed his wife.”

— Helen Simonson

34. “I don’t believe the greatest views in the world are great because they are vast or exotic... I think the power comes from the knowledge that they do not change. You look at them and you know they have been the same for a thousand years.”

— Helen Simonson

35. “Look, the truth belongs to the guy who’s best at sticking to his story,′ said Ferguson.”

— Helen Simonson

36. “I would prefer you did not apologize for anyone else,” she said. “My father always says that if we were as quick to own our own faults as we are to apologize for those of others, society might truly advance.”

— Helen Simonson

37. “I tell myself it does not matter what one reads-favorite authors, particular themes-as long as we read something. It is not even important to own the books.”

— Helen Simonson

38. “These were people who knew more than they said and who understood more quickly than those who talked more.”

— Helen Simonson

39. “Compromises are often built on their being unspoken.”

— Helen Simonson

40. “The world is full of small ignorances,” said a quiet voice. Mrs. Ali appeared at his elbow and gave the young woman a stern look. “We must all do our best to ignore them and thereby keep them small, don’t you think?”

— Helen Simonson

41. “Suffragettes!” whispered Agatha as if communicating a great scandal. “I’m quite sure invitations to tea are being quietly withdrawn all over the room.”

— Helen Simonson

42. “It is the unexpected note that makes the poem. You, Hugh, are the unexpected note.”

— Helen Simonson