Stella Gibbons

Pencil sketch of Gibbons

Stella Gibbons (5 January 1902 – 19 December 1989) was an English novelist, journalist, poet, and short-story writer.

Quotes

Cold Comfort Farm (1932)

• The life of a journalist is poor, nasty, brutish and short. So is his style.
  • Foreword.
  • Cf. Thomas Hobbes — "the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short", in Leviathan (1651), Pt. I, Ch. 13.

• The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.
  • Chapter 1.

• Flora inherited, however, from her father a strong will and from her mother a slender ankle. The one had not been impaired by always having her own way nor the other by the violent athletic sports in which she had been compelled to take part, but she realized that neither was adequate as an equipment for earning her keep.
  • Chapter 1.

• ...whereas there still lingers some absurd prejudice against living on one's friends, no limits are set, either by society or by one's own conscience, to the amount one may impose upon one's relatives.
  • Chapter 1.

• By god, D. H. Lawrence was right when he had 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?
  • Chapter 20.