Riches ... don't consist in having things, but in not having to do something you don't want to do. ... Riches is being able to thumb your nose.
Josephine TeyI expect this is what death is like when you meet it. Sort of wildly unfair but inevitable.
Josephine TeyThat was the way with grief: it left you alone for months together until you thought that you were cured, and then without warning it blotted out the sunlight.
Josephine TeyLetterwriting is the natural outlet of the "odds." The busy-bodies, the idle, the perverted, the cranks, the feel-it-my-duties ... Also the plain depraved. They all write letters. It's their safe outlet, you see. They can be as interfering, as long-winded, as obscene, as pompous, as one-idea'd, as they like on paper, and no one can kick them for it. So they write. My God, how they write!
Josephine TeyIt is the utterly destructive quality. When you say vanity, you are thinking of the kind that admires itself in mirrors and buys things to deck itself out in. But that is merely personal conceit. Real vanity is something quite different. A matter not of person but of personality. Vanity says, "I must have this because I am me." It is a frightening thing because it is incurable.
Josephine Tey