Top 50 Stella Gibbons Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I saw something nasty in the woodshed.”

— Stella Gibbons

2. “She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple.”

— Stella Gibbons

3. “Curious how Love destroys every vestige of that politeness which the human race, in its years of evolution, has so painfully acquired.”

— Stella Gibbons

4. “Like all really strong-minded women, on whom everybody flops, she adored being bossed about. It was so restful.”

— Stella Gibbons

5. “Nature is all very well in her place, but she must not be allowed to make things untidy.”

— Stella Gibbons

6. “Surely she had endured enough for one evening without having to listen to intelligent conversation?”

— Stella Gibbons

7. “The life of a journalist is poor, nasty, brutish, and short. So is his style.”

— Stella Gibbons

8. “Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm.”

— Stella Gibbons

9. “One of the disadvantages of almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one’s favorite writers. It gave one a curious feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one’s dressing gown.”

— Stella Gibbons

10. “There have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm.”

— Stella Gibbons

11. “By god, DH Lawrence was right when he said there must be a dumb, dark, dull, bitter belly-tension between a man and a woman, and how else could this be achieved save in the long monotony of marriage?”

— Stella Gibbons

12. “I do not object to the phenomena, but I do object to the parrot.”

— Stella Gibbons

13. “Unless everything is tidy and pleasant and comfortable all about one, people cannot even begin to enjoy life. I cannot endure messes.”

— Stella Gibbons

14. “Here was an occasion, she thought, for indulging in that deliberate rudeness which only persons with habitually good manners have the right to commit...”

— Stella Gibbons

15. “She could feel magic in the quiet spring day, like a sorcerer’s far-off voice, and lines of poetry floated over her mind as if they were strands of spider-web.”

— Stella Gibbons

16. “It was the loveliest hour of the English year: seven o’clock on Midsummer Night.”

— Stella Gibbons

17. “After another minute Reuben brought forth the following sentence: “I ha’ scranleted two hundred furrows come five o’clock down i’ the bute.” It was a difficult remark, Flora felt, to which to reply.”

— Stella Gibbons

18. “Happiness can never hope to command so much interest as distress.”

— Stella Gibbons

19. “A straight nose is a great help if one wishes to look serious’.”

— Stella Gibbons

20. “He was, she reflected, almost rudely like a tortoise; and she was glad her friend kept none as pets or they might have suspected mockery.”

— Stella Gibbons

21. “To tidy up takes time, and she wants all her time for wolfing books...”

— Stella Gibbons

22. “Daisies opened in sly lust to the sun-rays and rain-spears, and eft-flies, locked in a blind embrace, spun radiantly through the glutinous light to their ordained death.”

— Stella Gibbons

23. “Some people believe that an attractive woman cannot stop men falling in love with her; but she can. If she really, in her deepest heart, does not want it, neither will they.”

— Stella Gibbons

24. “Her blank eyes burrowed through the fetid air between herself and her visitor. They were without content; hollow pools of meaninglessness. They were not eyes, but voids sunk between two jutting pent-houses of bone and two bloodless hummocks of cheek. They suspended two raw rods of grief before their own immobility, like frozen fountains in a bright wintry air; and on these rods the fluttering rags of a futile grief were hung.”

— Stella Gibbons

25. “That would be delightful,′ agreed Flora, thinking how nasty and boring it would be.”

— Stella Gibbons

26. “In fact, she behaved like most of us do when in love; she never thought of her beloved as a human being at all, but only as an image upon which to drape dreams.”

— Stella Gibbons

27. “But she had a lively acquaintaince with confinement through the works of women novelists, especially those of the unmarried ones.”

— Stella Gibbons

28. “Flora sighed. It was curious that persons who lived what the novelists called a rich emotional life always seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake.”

— Stella Gibbons

29. “It is rather frightening to be able to write so revoltingly, yet so successfully. All these letters are works of art, except, perhaps, the last. They are positively oily.”

— Stella Gibbons

30. “She glanced upwards for a second at the soft blue vault of the midsummer night sky. Not a cloud misted its solemn depths. Tomorrow would be a beautiful day.”

— Stella Gibbons

31. “Mrs Smiling’s character was firm and her tastes civilized. Her method of dealing with wayward human nature when it insisted on obtruding its grossness upon her scheme of life was short and effective; she pretended things were not so: and usually, after a time, they were not. Christian Science is perhaps a larger organization, but seldom so successful.”

— Stella Gibbons

32. “Where are you flying off to?′ inquired Viola, rather sulkily; few sights are more annoying when we feel lazy than that of somebody bounding upstairs.”

— Stella Gibbons

33. “On the whole, Flora liked it better when they were silent, though it did rather give her the feeling that she was acting in one of the less cheerful German highbrow films.”

— Stella Gibbons

34. “His young man’s limbs, sleek in their dark male pride, seemed to disdain the covering offered them by the brief shorts and striped jersey. His body might have been naked, like his full, muscled throat, which rose, round and proud as the male organ of a flower, from the neck of his sweater.”

— Stella Gibbons

35. “And when April like an over-lustful lover leaped upon the lush flanks of the Downs there would be yet another child in the wretched hut down on Nettle Flitch Field, where Meriam housed the fruits of her shame.”

— Stella Gibbons

36. “She liked to watch her father as he read, and to listen to the smoothly rolling tones; she felt no curiosity about what the words meant. It was only Shakespeare and she was used to him.”

— Stella Gibbons

37. “The flies buzzed in answer above the dirty water standing in the washbasin, in which floated a solitary black hair. It, too, was like life – and as meaningless.”

— Stella Gibbons

38. “He stood at the table facing Flora and blowing heavily on his tea and staring at her. Flora did not mind. It was quite interesting: like having tea with a rhinoceros.”

— Stella Gibbons

39. “Coward! Liar! Libertine! Who were you with last night? Moll at the mill or Violet at the vicarage? Or Ivy, perhaps, at the ironmongery?”

— Stella Gibbons

40. “There you are, you see. It’s no use. You’ve chosen to be a married person. You mustn’t expect to lead the life of a bachelor.’ ‘But.”

— Stella Gibbons

41. “Marie Laurencin.”

— Stella Gibbons

42. “Persons of Aunt Ada’s temperament were not fond of a tidy life. Storms were what they liked; plenty of rows, and doors being slammed, and jaws sticking out, and faces white with fury, and faces brooding in corners, and faces making unnecessary fuss at breakfast, and plenty of opportunities for gorgeous emotional wallowings, and partings for ever, and misunderstandings, and interferings, and spyings, and, above all, managing and intriguing. Oh, they did enjoy themselves!”

— Stella Gibbons

43. “Send clean socks. Love to all except Micah.”

— Stella Gibbons

44. “Aunt Ada was most emphatically one of the Substances not Included in the Outline.”

— Stella Gibbons

45. “I did all that with my little hatchet.”

— Stella Gibbons

46. “You know how dreadful intelligent people are when you take them to dances.”

— Stella Gibbons

47. “Claud twisted the television dial and amused himself by studying Flora’s fair, pensive face. Her eyes were lowered and her mouth compressed over the serious business of arranging Elfine’s future. He fancied she was tracing a pattern with the tip of her shoe. She could not look at him, because public telephones were not fitted with television dials. ‘Oh, yes, we certainly don’t.”

— Stella Gibbons

48. “I found, after spending ten years as a journalist, learning to say exactly what I meant in short sentences, that I must learn, if I was to achieve literature and favourable reviews, to write as though I were not quite sure about what I meant but was jolly well going to say something all the same in sentences as long as possible.”

— Stella Gibbons

49. “Only a person with a candid mind, who is usually bored by intrigues, can appreciate the full fun of an intrigue when they begin to manage one for the first time. If there are several intrigues and there is a certain danger of their getting mixed up and spoiling each other, the enjoyment is even keener.”

— Stella Gibbons

50. “He came over to her with the lounging grace of a panther, and leaned against the mantelpiece.”

— Stella Gibbons