Maud Quotes

“Mr. Yeats makes great poetry out of what he calls his unhappiness about me, and he is happy in that. - Maud Gonne”

— Orna Ross

“Furniture, my good husband," she said, her mouth full of food, "that be too pretty is without pure thought. Tables with turned and carved legs only encourage the devil to dine."
My father stared at her, bewildered.
This house needs to be made ready for the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, for when he returns to our fair city and takes his rightful place as king, he'll be needing a good meal in a godly home. Do not you agree, husband?"
My father was speechless. Maud, in no way put off by his silence, said, "He will be very hungry. It has been a long time since the Last Supper.”

— Sally Gardner

“Crazy, batty Maud," Lita teased, wiping her nose across her sleeve and staring at Mally wickedly. "Ooooh, be careful, she might cut off your hair! She'll bargain for your fingernails!”

— M.L. LeGette

“I truly meant to only find you and bring you back to the landing, sweet, but when I saw you here alone, I could not help myself. It has been so many years I have longed for the forbidden fruit, Mary, and I am not really a very patient man. You were angered with me today for kissing Maud, but years of smiling and laughing with you and breathing in your sweet scent and seeing that luscious face and body near me and then bidding you a curt goodnight as you go to Will's or Henry's bed is pure hell." He reached over to smooth her hair. "I tell you, Mary, whomever I have slept with these past five years, I have dreamed it was you or, if not, your face came back to tease me-to haunt me-soon after. Do you understand?”

— Karen Harper

“Maud chuckled proudly and Erich shouted, "Welcome back from the Void, Kamerad," and then, because he's German and thinks all parties have to be noisy and satirically pompous, he jumped on a couch and announced, "Heren und Damen, permit me to introduce the noblest Roman of them all, Marcus Vipsalus Niger".”

— Fritz Leiber

“Maud: Young women are never happy.
Betty: Mother, what a thing to say.
Maud: Then when they're older they look back and see that comparatively speaking they were ecstatic.”

— Caryl Churchill

“And Maud bakes cookies, because when the darkness is too heavy to bear and too many things have been broken in too many ways to ever be fixed again, Maud doesn't know what weapon to use if one can't use dreams.”

— Fredrik Backman

“Opposite Lennart and Maud lives Alf. He drives a taxi and always wears a leather jacket under a layer of irascibility.”

— Fredrik Backman

“The International Express man couldn't understand it. I mean, in the old days, and it wasn't that long ago really, there had been an angler every dozen yards along the bank; children had played there; courting couples had come to listen to the splish and gurgle of the river, and to hold hands, and to get all lovey-dovey in the Sussex sunset. He'd done that with Maud, his missus, before they were married. They'd come here to spoon and, on one memorable occasion, fork."
From "Good Omens" by Terry Pratchet and Neil Gaiman.”

— Terry Pratchett

“A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows "This is I." An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, "This is not I." Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.”

— A.S. Byatt

“He hesitated. "They were what stayed alive, when I'd been taught and examined everything else."
Maud smiled then. "Exactly. That's it. What could survive our education.”

— A.S. Byatt

“Maud laughed, drily. Roland said, "And then, really, what is it, what is this arcane power we have, when we see that everything is human sexuality? It's really powerlessness."
Impotence," said Maud, leaning over, interested.
I was avoiding that word, because that precisely isn't the point. We are so knowing. And all we've found out, is primitive sympathetic magic. Infantile polymorphous perversity. Everything relates to us and we're so imprisoned in ourselves - we can't see things.”

— A.S. Byatt

“As for Fergus. He had a habit which Maud was not experienced enough to recognise as a common one in ex-lovers of giving little tugs at the carefully severed spider-threads or puppet-strings which had once tied her to him.”

— A.S. Byatt

“I had so looked forward to her walking." Maud carried her thirteen-month-old sister a few steps away and put her down on her feet. "Walk to Daddy," Maud said, and the baby threw out her arms and took the few steps across the space to her father's chair.”

— Katherine Paterson

“The book that made a lasting impression was the one my mother gave each of us when she decided we were ready for our first 'adult novel,' Lucy Maud Montgomery's 'The Blue Castle.'”

— Hallie Ephron

“We should regret our mistakes and learn from them, but never carry them forward into the future with us. -Lucy Maud Montgomery”

— Anonymous.

“The model for South America was Broadway actress Maxine Elliot. North America, a pretty blonde, was modeled on Maud Coleman Woods of Charlottesville, Virginia. (Sadly, she would die of typhoid fever that summer, ten days before McKinley arrived in Buffalo, thereby never living to see herself on a coaster, every southern belle's dream.)”

— Sarah Vowell

“Maud Gonne was - excuse me, Maud Gonne was central to the Gaelic literature revival. She wrote plays, and she sang.”

— Derrick Jensen

“In the struggle for female equality, Maud reflected, sometimes you had to fight women as well as men.”

— Ken Follett

“It was going to be difficult for Maud to get out of the house alone. Like all upper-class ladies, she was not supposed to go anywhere unescorted. Men pretended this was because they were so concerned to protect their women, but in truth it was a means of control. No doubt it would remain until women won the vote.”

— Ken Follett

“A country is mostly the people in it," Maud said. "I don't love England. My parents died a long time ago, and my brother has disowned me. I love Germany. For me, Germany is my wonderful husband, Walter; my misguided son, Erik; my alarmingly capable daughter, Carla; our maid, Ada, and her disabled son; my friend Monika and her family; my journalistic colleagues . . . I'm staying, to fight the Nazis.”

— Ken Follett

“Maud had feared this. Fitz was no compromiser. He believed that Britain should issue orders and the world should obey. The idea that the government might have to negotiate with others as equals was abhorrent to him. And there were distressingly many who agreed.”

— Ken Follett

“Her great resentment was that she had had no education. When she was seventeen, she had announced that she was going to university-whereupon everyone had laughed at her. It turned out that you had to come from a good school, and pass examinations, before they would let you in. Maud had never been to school, and even though she could discuss politics with the great men of the land, a succession of governesses and tutors had completely failed to equip her to pass any sort of exam. She had cried and raged for days, and even now thinking about it could still put her in a foul mood. This was what made her a suffragette: she knew girls would never get a decent education until women had the vote.”

— Ken Follett

“Our government doesn't necessarily agree with Wilson's Fourteen Points." Maud nodded. "I suppose we're against point five, about colonial peoples having a say in their own government." "Exactly. What about Rhodesia, and Barbados, and India? We can't be expected to ask the natives' permission before we civilize them. Americans are far too liberal. And we're dead against point two, freedom of the seas in war and peace.”

— Ken Follett

“The degradation to which you subject others comes back, sooner or later, to haunt you, Maud thought.”

— Ken Follett

“She read a short report in The Times datelined Vienna and headed THE SERVIAN SCARE. She asked Bea if Russia would defend Serbia against the Austrians. "I hope not!" Bea said, alarmed. "I don't want my brother to go to war." Maud”

— Ken Follett

“That's a poor match, Sean Kendrick," says a voice at my elbow. It's the other sister from Fathom & Sons, and she follows my gaze to Puck. "Neither of you are a housewife."
I don't look away from Puck. "I think you assume too much, Dory Maud."
"You leave nothing to assumption," Dory Maud says. "You swallow her with your eyes. I'm surprised there's any of her left for the rest of us to see.”

— Maggie Stiefvater

“It puzzled Maud that her male relatives could not see this. Was it that men could not believe a woman might share their ambitions, their need for power? Eleanor saw herself as more than Henry's queen, mother of his children. First and foremost, she was Duchess of Aquitaine, never doubting that she could have ruled as well as any man and better than most.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

“I don't know what's come over this place,' Maud stated. 'However, the Lord did, so in despair He showed me what I had better do.'
'And did the Lord suggest your sticking up your father for ten shillings?'
'No, I thought of that,' said Maud, not turning a hair.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

“I am fairly certain that my independent, high-spirited grandmother must have had a childhood similar to Betsy Ray'sAs I read about the School Entertainment and ice cream socials, about ladies leaving calling cards and the milkman with his horse-drawn wagon, I felt that I was having an unexpected and welcome peek into Granny's childhood-a gift to me from Maud Hart Lovelace”

— Ann M. Martin

“Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat, night, has flown Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone: And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, And the musk of the rose is blown. For a breeze of morning moves, And the planet of Love is on high, Beginning to faint in the light that she loves On a bed of daffodil sky.”

— Alfred Lord Tennyson