Elizabeth Aston (1948-2016)

Quotes

• A man's looks are measured by the depth of his pockets.

• Anyone may have diamonds: an heirloom is an ornament of quite a different kind.

• People make one happy, not houses? I do not think so. Houses are more to be trusted than people.

• One's first love is always perfect until one meets one's second love.

• You can't jump down the stairs in one leap, however much you might wish to, and you even more surely can't jump up it, but one step and then the next and there you are, at the top or the bottom and not a bit out of breath or discomposed.

• Mountains inspire awe in any human person who has a soul. They remind us of our frailty, our unimportance, of the briefness of our span upon this earth. They touch the heavens, and sail serenely at an altitude beyond even the imaginings of a mere mortal.

• It is a sadness of growing older that we lose our ardent appreciation of what is new and different and difficult.

• There was no escaping by means of any journey, however adventurous, one took one's problems and sorrows with one.

• How close the sexes sometimes come to one another. It is as much a matter of behaviour and the spere in which they move that separates the masculine part of humanity from the feminine.

• Easy enough to dismiss others' problems when you had none of your own.

• One remembers horrors, I think, for the rest of one's life, but memories do not always remain so sharp, and with time, and new circumstance, do not affect us so powerfully.

• Anyone who goes through life trusting people without making sure they are worthy of trust is a fool. Yet there are people who may be trusted, men as well as women. There are are as many difference in their natures as there are flowers in these meadows.

• Love has no place in a lawyer's office.

• The trouble with lies was that once started, the fiction had to be continued, and it was hard always to be remembering details that you had made up upon the spur of the moment.

• It's not what you want in this life, it's what you get that you have to do with.

• Concern for someone else was a good remedy for taking the mind off one's own troubles.

• Charge less, but charge. Otherwise, you will not be taken seriously, and you do your fellow artists no favours if you undercut the market.

• It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

• We have to have the money to do the work we want to do, as well as to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. Fat commissions are good, but not always easy to come by, and each new painting takes its time. So we need to find every way possible to earn extra income from our work.

• You would not think that birds who have no brain at all could become so friendly. I swear some of them are more intelligent than many humans, but that says more about our fellow beings than it does about the birds.