Dodie Smith
Dodie Smith
Dorothy Gladys "Dodie" Smithwas an English children's novelist and playwright, known best for the novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians. Other works include I Capture the Castle, and The Starlight Barking. The Hundred and One Dalmatians was adapted into a 1961 Disney animated movie version. Her novel I Capture the Castle was adapted into a 2003 movie version. I Capture the Castle was voted number 82 as "one of the nation's 100 best-loved novels" by the British public as part of...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionDramatist
Date of Birth3 May 1896
Am I really admitting that my sister is determined to marry a man she has only seen once and doesn't much like the look of? It is half real and half pretense - and I have an idea that it is a game most girls play when they meet an eligible young men. They just...wonder.
I found it quite easy to carry on a casual conversation it was as if my real feelings were down fathoms deep in my mind and what we said was just a feathery surface spray.
Still, looking through the old volumes was soothing, because thinking of the past made the present seem a little less real.
But some characters in books are really real--Jane Austen's are; and I know those five Bennets at the opening of Pride and Prejudice, simply waiting to raven the young men at Netherfield Park, are not giving one thought to the real facts of marriage.
I shouldn't think even millionaires could eat anything nicer than new bread and real butter and honey for tea.
Like many other much-loved humans, they believed that they owned their dogs, instead of realizing that their dogs owned them.
Just to be in love seemed the most blissful luxury I had ever known. The thought came to me that perhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return -- that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness. For a moment I felt that I had discovered a great truth.
I think it [religion] is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communion all the other arts attempt.
Rose doesn’t like the flat country, but I always did – flat country seems to give the sky such a chance.
My God - it's a green child!" said the American. "What is this place - the House of Usher?
Father says hot water can be as stimulating as an alcoholic drink and though I never come by one...I can well believe it.
I have really sinned. I am going to pause now, and sit here on the mound repenting in deepest shame...
...With stories even a page can take me hours, but the truth seems to flow out as fast as I can get it down.
I could hear rain still pouring from the gutters and a thin branch scraping against one of the windows; but the church seemed completely cut off from the restless day outside--just as I felt cut off from the church. I thought: I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness.