Dodie Smith
Dodie Smith
Dorothy Gladys "Dodie" Smithwas an English children's novelist and playwright, known best for the novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians. Other works include I Capture the Castle, and The Starlight Barking. The Hundred and One Dalmatians was adapted into a 1961 Disney animated movie version. Her novel I Capture the Castle was adapted into a 2003 movie version. I Capture the Castle was voted number 82 as "one of the nation's 100 best-loved novels" by the British public as part of...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionDramatist
Date of Birth3 May 1896
Dodie Smith quotes about
If you love people, you take them on trust.
I have really sinned. I am going to pause now, and sit here on the mound repenting in deepest shame...
My hand is very tired but I want to go on writing. I keep resting and thinking. All day I have been two people - the me imprisoned in yesterday and the me out here on the mound; and now there is a third me trying to get in - the me in what is going to happen next.
I could hear rain still pouring from the gutters and a thin branch scraping against one of the windows; but the church seemed completely cut off from the restless day outside--just as I felt cut off from the church. I thought: I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness.
They call them the haunted shores, these stretches of Devonshire and Cornwall and Ireland which rear up against the westward ocean. Mists gather here, and sea fog, and eerie stories. That's not because there are more ghosts here than in other places, mind you. It's just that people who live hereabouts are strangely aware of them.
Wakings are the worst times--almost before my eyes are open a great weight seems to roll on my heart.
Perhaps it would really be rather dull to be married and settled for life. Liar! It would be heaven.
And who says you always have to understand things? You can like them without understanding them -- like 'em better sometimes.
Perhaps what you call conventionality, I call decency.
Sometimes [the expression] old age has a kind of harrowing beauty. But elderly - ugh!
Time takes the ugliness and horror out of death and turns it into beauty.
The family, that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor in our innermost hearts never quite wish to.
There is something revolting about the way girls' minds often jump to marriage long before they jump to love. And most of those minds are shut to what marriage really means.
I have noticed that when things happen in one's imaginings, they never happen in one's life.