Top 60 Nancy Mitford Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If one can’t be happy, one must be amused...”

— Nancy Mitford

2. “Sun, silence, and happiness.”

— Nancy Mitford

3. “It’s a funny thing that people are always ready to admit it if they’ve no talent for drawing or music, whereas everyone imagines that they themselves are capable of true love, which is a talent like any other, only far more rare.”

— Nancy Mitford

4. “An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off: it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.”

— Nancy Mitford

5. “I do love translating; it is the pure pleasure of writing without the misery of inventing.”

— Nancy Mitford

6. “Children should be like waffles – you should be able to throw the first one away.”

— Nancy Mitford

7. “One thing about tourists is that it is very easy to get away from them. Like ants they follow a trail and a few yards each side of that trail there are none.”

— Nancy Mitford

8. “I Love children, especially when they cry for then someone takes them away.”

— Nancy Mitford

9. “I am sometimes bored by people, but never by life.”

— Nancy Mitford

10. “To fall in love you have to be in the state of mind for it to take, like a disease.”

— Nancy Mitford

11. “Life is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake, and here is one of them.”

— Nancy Mitford

12. “The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness.”

— Nancy Mitford

13. “Sisters are a shield against life’s cruel adversity.”

— Nancy Mitford

14. “Love indeed – whoever invented love ought to be shot.”

— Nancy Mitford

15. “And Left-wing people are always sad because they mind dreadfully about their causes, and the causes are always going so badly.”

— Nancy Mitford

16. “I have only ever read one book in my life, and that is White Fang. It’s so frightfully good I’ve never bothered to read another.”

— Nancy Mitford

17. “When the loo paper gets thicker and the writing paper thinner, it’s always a bad sign, at home.”

— Nancy Mitford

18. “Men, in general, are so treacherous, so envious, and so cruel that it is a comfort to find one who is only weak.”

— Nancy Mitford

19. “She belonged to that rare and objectionable species, the intellectual snob devoid of intellect.”

— Nancy Mitford

20. “I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened.”

— Nancy Mitford

21. “Always remember, children, that marriage is a very intimate relationship. It’s not just sitting and chatting to a person; there are other things, you know.”

— Nancy Mitford

22. “You’ve no idea how long life goes on and how many, many changes it brings. Young people seem to imagine that it’s over in a flash, that they do this thing, or that thing, and then die, but I can assure you they are quite wrong.”

— Nancy Mitford

23. “I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.”

— Nancy Mitford

24. “Surely a King who loves pleasure is less dangerous than one who loves glory?”

— Nancy Mitford

25. “Irish gardens beat all for horror. With 19 gardeners, Lord Talbot of Malahide has produced an affair exactly like a suburban golf course.”

— Nancy Mitford

26. “Nonsense. And don’t you go marrying just anybody, for love,” she said. “Remember that love cannot last; it never, never does; but if you marry all this it’s for your life. One day, don’t forget, you’ll be middle-aged and think what that must be like for a woman who can’t have, say, a pair of diamond earrings. A woman of my age needs diamonds near her face, to give a sparkle.”

— Nancy Mitford

27. “Life itself, she thought, as she went upstairs to dress for dinner, was stranger than dreams and far, far more disordered.”

— Nancy Mitford

28. “A typical Irish dinner would be: cream flavored with lobster, cream with bits of veal in it, green peas and cream, cream cheese, cream flavored with strawberries.”

— Nancy Mitford

29. “Isn’t it lovely to be lovely me!”

— Nancy Mitford

Featured in: Romance Quotes

30. “Greece is not a country of happy mediums: everything there seems to be either wonderful or horrible...”

— Nancy Mitford

31. “She had all the sentimentality of her generation, and this sentimentality, growing like a green moss over her spirit, helped to conceal its texture of stone, if not from others, at any rate from herself. She was convinced that she was a woman of profound sensibility.”

— Nancy Mitford

32. “Americans relate all effort, all work, and all of life itself to the dollar. Their talk is of nothing but dollars.”

— Nancy Mitford

33. “One’s emotions are intensified in Paris – one can be more happy and also more unhappy here than in any other place. But it is always a positive source of joy to live here, and there is nobody so miserable as a Parisian in exile from his town.”

— Nancy Mitford

34. “I have often noticed that when women look at themselves in every reflection, and take furtive peeps into their looking-glasses, it is hardly ever, as is generally supposed, from vanity, but much more often from a feeling that all is not quite as it should be.”

— Nancy Mitford

35. “In France that is the one rule, never make trouble.”

— Nancy Mitford

36. “Well, now you can see for yourself that she was delicate”, said Davey triumphantly. “She’s dead. It killed her. Doesn’t that show you? I do wish I could make you Radletts understand that there is no such thing as imaginary illness. Nobody who is quite well could possibly be bothered to do all the things that I, for instance, am obliged to, in order to keep my wretched frame on its feet.”

— Nancy Mitford

37. “Nobody ought to write books before they’re thirty. I hate precocity.”

— Nancy Mitford

38. “Oh my past! It’s such a long time ago now.”

— Nancy Mitford

39. “But I couldn’t think it more hateful of them to have taken my fur tippet. Burglars never seem to realize one might feel the cold. How would they like it if I took away their wife’s shawl?”

— Nancy Mitford

40. “Most people like reading about what they already know – there is even a public for yesterday’s weather.”

— Nancy Mitford

41. “Chickens are cheerless birds, I advise you to keep geese which can be taught to follow like dogs, one needs all the companionship one can get in these days.”

— Nancy Mitford

42. “The English lord marries for love, and is rather inclined to love where money is.”

— Nancy Mitford

43. “As far as I am concerned, all reading is for pleasure.”

— Nancy Mitford

44. “Oh poor Octave, no luck at all, as usual,” said Madame Rocher, “he is still with his regiment, still only a captain. Of course, if it hadn’t been for this wretched war, he would be at least a colonel by now.”

— Nancy Mitford

45. “I think Linda realized there and then what it took me years to learn, that the behaviour of civilized man really has nothing to do with nature, that all is artificiality and art more or less perfected.”

— Nancy Mitford

46. “Time passed, and a morning came when Grace woke up at Yeotown feeling, if not quite happy, at least without a stifling blanket of unhappiness. This blanket had hitherto weighed upon her like something physical, so that there had been days when she had hardly been able to rise from under it and get out of bed.”

— Nancy Mitford

47. “The people welcome a new da yas if they were certain of liking it, the shopkeepers pull up their blinds serene in the expectation of good trade, the workers go happily to their work, the people who have sat up all night in night clubs go happily to their rest, the orchestra of motor-car horns, of clanking trams, of whistling policemen tunes up for the daily symphony, and everywhere is joy.”

— Nancy Mitford

48. “Always be civil to the girls, you never know who they may marry’ is a aphorism which has saved many an English spinster from being treated like an Indian widow.”

— Nancy Mitford

49. “Mother, of course, takes a lot of exercise, walks and so on. And every morning she puts on a pair of black silk drawers and a sweater and makes indelicate gestures on the lawn. That’s called Building the Body Beautiful. She’s mad about it.”

— Nancy Mitford

50. “Spring came late, but when it came it was hand-in-hand with summer, and almost at once everything was baking and warm, and in the villages the people danced every night on concrete dancing floors under the plane trees...”

— Nancy Mitford