Jan Struther Quotes

To visit a new country for the first time is great fun; but it is even greater fun to introduce somebody else to a country that you know.

It took me forty years on earth To reach this sure conclusion: There is no Heaven but clarity, No Hell except confusion.

[Y]ou cannot successfully navigate the future unless you keep always framed beside it a small clear image of the past.

How much of the fun of parenthood lay in watching the children remake, with delighted wonder, one's own discoveries.

Swans ... always look as though they'd just been reading their own fan-mail.

Hard words will break no bones:
But more than bones are broken
By the inescapable stones
Of fond words left unspoken.

And I am a mockery, who was God before.

Left wing ... Right wing ... it's so limited; why doesn't it ever occur to any of them that what one is really longing for is the wishbone?

In childhood the daylight always fails too soon
except when there are going to be fireworks;

Constructive destruction is one of the most delightful employments in the world, and in civilized life the opportunities for it are only too rare.

Clem Miniver: She was a good cook, as good cooks go. And as good cooks go, she went.

Librarianship is one of the few callings in the world for which is it still possible to feel unqualified admiration and respect.

One is what one remembers: no more, no less.

Punctuality is the thief of adventure ...

[Gardening] is a means by which you can attain many valuable hours of solitude without being thought unsociable.

Giving a party is like having a baby: its conception is more fun than its completion; and once you have begun it, it is almost impossible to stop.

O love's a simple word to sayWith nature aiding and abetting

It's as important to marry the right life as it is the right person.

For to love, loveless, is a bitter pill:But to be loved, unloving, bitterer still.

To be entirely at leisure for one day is to be for one day an immortal

The importance of the ordinary citizen is very greatly underestimated - not so much by those in authority as by the ordinary citizen himself.

To achieve unity without uniformity is the whole essence of the democratic way of life.

Words were the only net to catch a mood, the only sure weapon against oblivion.

[T]he mechanics of life should never be allowed to interfere with living.

The worst of gardening is that it's so full of metaphors one hardly knows where to begin.