Rosamond Lehmann

[On Ian Fleming:] The trouble with Ian is that he gets off with women because he can't get on with them.

— Rosamond Lehmann

“Yes, we are sure of it. These walls enclose a world. Here is continuity spinning a web from room to room, from…

— Rosamond Lehmann

Advice to Young Journal Keepers. Be lenient with yourself. Conceal your worst faults, leave out your most shameful thoughts, actions, and temptations.…

— Rosamond Lehmann

People have been saying the novel is dead for as far back as I can remember. The novel will never die, but…

— Rosamond Lehmann

anything that becomes a cult, or a mass movement, loses its moral and spiritual value. The crusade has to be personal, individual.…

— Rosamond Lehmann

Convention is another name for the habits of society.

— Rosamond Lehmann

It's the thought that counts.

— Rosamond Lehmann

Looking back into childhood is like looking into a semi-transparent globe within which people and places lie embedded. A shake - and…

— Rosamond Lehmann

“Still, now and then they seemed to be holding behind them the surprising, the magic vistas of childhood - the sudden snow…

— Rosamond Lehmann

One should always act from one's inner sense of rhythm.

— Rosamond Lehmann

How long, I wonder, will ignorance spell purity and knowledge shame?

— Rosamond Lehmann

“I want to do something absolutely different, or perhaps nothing at all: just stay where I am, in my home, and absorb…

— Rosamond Lehmann

Holidays, if you enjoy them, have no history.

— Rosamond Lehmann

I have decided to keep a record of my inmost real-self thoughts. Perhaps it will help me to find out what I…

— Rosamond Lehmann

In a corner of the churchyard grew a plantation of white violets, enormously plump and prosperous-looking. ... I saw the dead stretched…

— Rosamond Lehmann

“The present mood in which they sat relaxed was nothing more than the relief of two people coming back to a bombed…

— Rosamond Lehmann

But poetry is not to be lived, except for the few to whom it is more important than self-preservation.

— Rosamond Lehmann

One can present people with opportunities. One cannot make them equal to them.

— Rosamond Lehmann

“Another five minutes, thought Olivia, and shut her eyes. Not to fall asleep again; but to go back as it were and…

— Rosamond Lehmann

when two people unite, kindness must be mutual, or shocking things will happen.

— Rosamond Lehmann

A writer works from the material she has, but it comes from the unconscious. Everything is stored up and one never knows…

— Rosamond Lehmann

One must have the humility and the imagination to honor all deep human experiences - not least those one has never come…

— Rosamond Lehmann

The novel will never die, but it will keep changing and evolving and taking different shapes.

— Rosamond Lehmann

“It'll all come right. Because, of course, I do believe...I believe - I believe in everything...sun, moon, stars, in seasons - trees,…

— Rosamond Lehmann