Maggie Smith credited as playing...
Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham
- Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham: [drolly, after a dinner guest gets food spilled on her and the butler suffers an apparent heart attack, to another guest] You'll find there's never a dull moment with this house.
- Lady Edith Crawley: I said I could drive the tractor.
- Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham: Edith! You are a *lady*, not Toad of Toad Hall!
- [Lady Sybil and Isobel are proposing setting up a convalescent home at Downton Abbey]
- Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham: I think it's a *ridiculous* idea.
- Lady Sybil Crawley: Why?
- Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham: Because this is a house, not a hospital.
- Lady Mary Crawley: Granny, a convalescent home is where people rest and recuperate.
- Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham: But if there are relapses. What then? Amputation in the dining room? Rescuscitation in the pantry?
- Cora, Countess of Grantham: It would certainly be the most tremendous disturbance. If you knew how chaotic things are as it is.
- Isobel Crawley: But when there's so much good can be done.
- [Violet stamps her stick on the floor]
- Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham: I forbid it! To have strange men prodding and prying around the house. To say nothing of pocketing the spoons. It's out of the question.
- Cora, Countess of Grantham: I hesitate to remind you, but this is my house now - Robert's and mine. *We* will make the decision.
- Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham: [pause] Oh, I see. So now I'm an outsider... who need not be consulted.
- Cora, Countess of Grantham: Since you put it like that, yes.
- Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham: The truth is neither here nor there. It's the look of the thing that matters.
- Lady Rosamund Painswick: But Mary seems to have blotted her copybook in some way. So she needs a suitable marriage that will mend her fences.
- Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham: Well, how do we know Carlisle is suitable? Who is he? Who'd ever heard of him before the war?
- Lady Rosamund Painswick: Sir Richard is powerful and rich and well on the way to a peerage. Of course, he may not be all that one would wish, but Mary can soon smooth off the rough edges.
- Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham: Well, you should know.
- Lady Rosamund Painswick: What do you mean by that? Marmaduke was a gentleman.
- Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham: Marmaduke was the grandson of a manufacturer.
- Lady Rosamund Painswick: His mother was the daughter of a baronet.
- Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham: Maybe, but they were no great threat to the Plantagenets.