#l

At 11, I passed the scholarship - only just; I wasn't very good at maths - to Ilford County High for Girls. When the Second World War started we were evacuated, first of all to Ipswich, and then to Aberdare, Queen of the Valleys, in south Wales. ↗

— Nina Bawden

#first #first of all #good #high #i

Margaret Thatcher was in my year, and our first-year college photograph shows us standing side by side in the back row. We were both grammar school girls on state scholarships. ↗

— Nina Bawden

#both #college #grammar #grammar school #margaret

Later in my life, I'm going to look back and smile and be very fulfilled. I know that if I don't give it my all right now I'll regret it later. That's very important to me, because I've worked all my life to have this. ↗

— Shania Twain

#because #fulfilled #give #going #i

I grew up on a suburban street with lace curtains and dull neighbours, so I made up stories to tell my friend, in which they became serial killers and burglars. She told her mother, who then told mine. ↗

— Nina Bawden

#burglars #curtains #dull #friend #grew

I met my second husband on a bus. We looked at each other and that was it. We were both married to other people at the time and behaved badly, but we didn't seem to have any choice. We were very happy for nearly 50 years and would still be together if it wasn't for the bloody railways. ↗

— Nina Bawden

#badly #behaved #bloody #both #bus

Young people are being elected for School Boards all over the country. ↗

— Birch Bayh

#boards #country #elected #over #people

One day, someone said to me, 'Do you want to go jump out of an airplane?' I felt like I had nothing to lose anymore, so I said, 'Why not?' And every day since then, I ask myself that question. ↗

— Shania Twain

#anymore #ask #day #every #every day

I wanted to be a war reporter - scrabbling around, exposing things. I didn't want to go to university, I wanted to get a job, but Auntie Beryl said I should go to Oxford. ↗

— Nina Bawden

#exposing #get #go #i #job

I was cleaning out the pigsty at a farm in Wales, where my mother had rented a room, when the results of my final school exam were handed to me by the postman, along with the news that I had a state scholarship to Oxford. I had waited for this letter for so many weeks that I had abandoned hope, deciding that I had failed ignominiously. ↗

— Nina Bawden

#along #cleaning #deciding #exam #failed

...and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all. ↗

— Anton Chekhov

#love