death ... is not a great affair! Think - it happens once only - to each of us - as birth does. What do you know about being born? that - and no more - will you know about the act of death.
Phyllis BottomeHuman beings don't show, any more than cities at dusk, their real necessities! And yet if you looked -- past the circle of outside lights, through the street walls still standing -- into the want and emptiness within!
Phyllis BottomeIt is you men who make war! ... We, who have children, would never make it! Why should a woman be broken up in pain, to give her child life, only to see him carried away from her, to make food for guns?
Phyllis BottomeWhen we refuse to accept our limitations, Nature, who is a stern realist, pays us out.
Phyllis BottomeIf a writer is true to his characters they will give him his plot. Observations must play second fiddle to integrity.
Phyllis Bottomeall daughters, even when most aggravated by their mothers, have a secret respect for them. They believe perhaps that they can do everything better than their mothers can, and many things they can do better, but they have not yet lived long enough to be sure how successfully they will meet the major emergencies of life, which lie, sometimes quite creditably, behind their mothers.
Phyllis Bottome