Sybille Bedford

In Europe, where human relations like clothes are supposed to last, one's got to be wearable. In France one has to be…

— Sybille Bedford

I write because I'm a writer. It is rather like cooking: to make something out of the raw material at hand.

— Sybille Bedford

“Architecture without pain, art looked at in undiluted pleasure, enjoyment without anxiety, compunction, heartache: there is no beggar woman in the church…

— Sybille Bedford

I detest . . . anything over-cooked, over-herbed, over-sauced, over elaborate. Nothing can go very far wrong at table as long as…

— Sybille Bedford

The future of human society. Had it made an irrevocably false start? The compass error that gets harder to correct with every…

— Sybille Bedford

“A devastating, a traumatic defeat, [to Germany] and the Danes might well have fallen into a Treaty of Versailles mentality. Mysteriously, they…

— Sybille Bedford

public opinion, the sum of private opinions, does matter, can matter often for good.

— Sybille Bedford

“War and the threat of war begin when all is not well at home. Countries that solve their own problems are no…

— Sybille Bedford

All food is the gift of the gods and has something of the miraculous, the egg no less than the truffle.

— Sybille Bedford

A part, a large part, of traveling is an engagement of the ego v. the world. The world is hydra headed, as…

— Sybille Bedford

All wealth is relative; and so is its absence.

— Sybille Bedford

One does odd things. You see, when one's young one doesn't feel part of it yet, the human condition; one does things…

— Sybille Bedford

It would seem that in history it's never a tooth for a tooth, but a thousand, a hundred thousand for one.

— Sybille Bedford

“Guillermo was lonely and serviceable and always rushed in to do the things one wanted in a way one did not want…

— Sybille Bedford