Quotes from book
Cold Comfort Farm

Stella Gibbons

Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel by English author Stella Gibbons, published in 1932. It parodies the romanticised, sometimes doom-laden accounts of rural life popular at the time, by writers such as Mary Webb.

Stella Gibbons photo

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

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm

Stella Gibbons photo

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

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm

Stella Gibbons photo

“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 book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm

Stella Gibbons photo

“I saw something nasty in the woodshed.”

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm

Stella Gibbons photo

“Mary, you know I hate parties. My idea of hell is a very large party in a cold room where everybody has to play hockey properly.”

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm

Stella Gibbons photo

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

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm

Stella Gibbons photo

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

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm

Stella Gibbons photo

“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.”

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm (1932), Chapter 1.

Stella Gibbons photo

“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?”

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm (1932), Chapter 20.

Stella Gibbons photo

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

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Foreword.
Cf. Thomas Hobbes — "the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short", in Leviathan (1651), Pt. I, Ch. 13.
Cold Comfort Farm (1932)

Stella Gibbons photo

“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.”

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm (1932), Chapter 1.

Stella Gibbons photo

“…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.”

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm (1932), Chapter 1.

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