Elizabeth von Arnim Quotes
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No lady she had had to do with had ever had such a thing on her dressing-table. Powder was different, because one needed powder sometimes for other things besides one’s face, and also one powdered babies, and they, poor lambs, couldn’t be suspected of wanting to appear different from what God had made them. But a lip-stick! Red stuff. What actresses put on, and those who were no better than they should be. Her mistress and a lip-stick—what would Miss Virginia say?
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Remembered how I was only a speck after all in uncomfortably limitless space, of no account whatever in the general scheme of things, but with a horrid private capacity for being often and easily hurt; and how specks have a trick of dying, which I in my turn would presently do, and a fresh speck, not nearly so nice, as I hoped and believed, would immediately start up and fill my vacancy, perhaps so exactly my vacancy that it would even wear my gloves and stockings.
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But while admiring my neighbour, I don't think I shall ever try to follow in her steps, my talents not being of the energetic and organising variety, but rather of that order which makes their owner almost lamentably prone to take up a volume of poetry and wander out to where the kingcups grow, and, sitting on a willow trunk beside a little stream, forget the very existence of everything but green pastures and still waters, and the glad blowing of the wind across the joyous fields.
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Oh, my dear, this is worse than I expected! A strange girl is always a bore among good friends, but one can generally manage her. But a girl who writes books - why, it isn't respectable! And you can't snub that sort of people; they're unsnubbable.
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Oh well, I’ll be sure to pick you up again somewhere. It isn’t a very big island, and you are a conspicuous object, driving round it.’ This was true. So long as I was on that island I could not hope to escape Charlotte. I entered Binz in a state of moody acquiescence.
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And there is no getting away from it, I am made for dogs and dogs for me, because the instant I saw him I began to cheer up.
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...to go into the garden in its snowed-up state is like going into a bath of purity. The first breath on opening the door is so ineffably pure that it makes me gasp, and I feel a black and sinful object in the midst of all the spotlessness.
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Was she the same person to-night as last night? Was she two persons? If she was only one, which one? Or was she a mere vessel of receptiveness, a transparent vessel into which other people poured their view of her, and she instantly reflected the exact colour of their opinion?
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Her great dead friends did not seem worth reading that night. They always said the same things now—over and over again they said the same things, and nothing new was to be got out of them any more for ever. No doubt they were greater than any one was now, but they had this immense disadvantage, that they were dead. Nothing further was to be expected of them; while of the living, what might one not still expect?
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I WOULD LIKE, to begin with, to say that though parents, husbands, children, lovers and friends are all very well, they are not dogs. In my day and turn having been each of the above,—except that instead of husbands I was wives,—I know what I am talking about, and am well acquainted with the ups and downs, the daily ups and downs, the sometimes almost hourly ones in the thin-skinned, which seem inevitably to accompany human loves. Dogs are free from these fluctuations. Once they love, they love steadily, unchangingly, till their last breath. That is how I like to be loved. Therefore I will write of dogs.
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September 15th. - This is the month of quiet days, crimson creepers, and blackberries; of mellow afternoons in the ripening garden; of tea under acacias instead of too shady beeches; of wood fires in the library in chilly evenings.
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And so at Binz, dragged out of my pleasant dream to night and loneliness, I could not move for a moment for sheer extremity of fright. When I did, when I did put out a shaking hand to feel for the matches, the dread of years became a reality—I touched another hand. Now I think it was very wonderful of me not to scream. I suppose I did not dare. I don’t know how I managed it, petrified as I was with terror, but the next thing that happened was that I found myself under the bedclothes thinking things over. Whose hand had I touched? And what was it doing on my table? It was a nasty, cold hand, and it had clutched at mine as I tore it away. Oh—there it was, coming after me—it was feeling its way along the bedclothes—surely it was not real—it must be a nightmare—and that was why no sound came when I tried to shriek.
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The passion of being forever with one's fellows, and the fear of being left for a few hours alone, is to me wholly incomprehensible.
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I don’t know that doom is a very nice word. It does suggest, I think, shuddering and cold sweat. There was none of that, though, about Coco’s welcome to it when it opened my front door and walked in, nor can it be fairly said that there was any of it about mine. True I had a feeling, unusual so soon after breakfast, that I was in the hands of God, but otherwise I wasn’t aware of any particular discomfort. Nor did I remember, till later, that the only other time in my life I had had this feeling was when I was dressing to go to the party in Italy at which I met my first husband. It is a sinking feeling. Perhaps husbands have never altogether agreed with me.
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Pincher took me to London, and Knobbie brought me away. It looked as if I were beginning to be led about by dogs.
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There's no safety in love. You risk the whole of life. But the great thing is to risk -to believe, and to risk everything for your belief.
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I know no surer way of shaking off the dreary crust formed about the soul by the trying to do one’s duty or the patient enduring of having somebody else’s duty done to one, than going out alone, either at the bright beginning of the day, when the earth is still unsoiled by the feet of the strenuous and only God is abroad; or in the evening, when the hush has come, out to the blessed stars, and looking up at them wonder at the meanness of the day just past, at the worthlessness of the things one has struggled for, at the folly of having been so angry, and so restless, and so much afraid. Nothing focusses life more exactly than a little while alone at night with the stars. What are perfunctory bedroom prayers hurried through in an atmosphere of blankets, to this deep abasement of the spirit before the majesty of heaven? And as a consecration of what should be yet one more happy day, of what value are those hasty morning devotions.
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...she found herself blessing God for her creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life, but above all for His inestimable Love; out loud; in a burst of acknowledgement.
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And the summer seems as though it would dream on for ever.
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They snatched that from me which I still held. They vied with each other in reading poetry to me in sheltered corners. They hung on my words, and laughed appreciatively every time I opened my mouth—sometimes even before I had opened it, which is conduct that easily dries up the springs of conversation. Such young men do exist, and it is a pity, because they are so bad for the older women, who give heed to their flutings at their own peril. I daresay they would have been bad for me too if I had taken them seriously, but I wasn’t quite old enough to do that, and my sole reaction to their devotion was that I was irked.
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Yet he knew that if she wavered he would never forgive her; she would drop at once from her high estate into those depths in his opinion where the dull average of both sexes sprawled for ever in indiscriminate heaps.
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A wet day and indoors: that was the time and place to tell him. Of course if he became very silly she would tell him instantly; but as long as he wasn’t—and how could he be in an open taxi?—as long as he was just happy to be with her and take her out and walk her round among crocuses and give her tea and bring her home again tucked in as carefully as if she were some extraordinarily precious brittle treasure, why should she interfere? It was so amusing to be a treasure,—yes, and so sweet. Let her be honest with herself—it was sweet. She hadn’t been a treasure, not a real one, not the kind for whom things are done by enamoured men, for years,—indeed, not ever; for George from the first, even before he was one, had behaved like a husband. He was so much older than she was; and though his devotion was steady and lasting he had at no time been infatuated. She had been a treasure, certainly, but of the other kind, the kind that does things for somebody else. Mrs. Mitcham, on a less glorified scale, was that type of treasure.
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The evil times had come of eking out, of making do. At least, my husband seemed to regard the times we had arrived at as evil, but that was because he was in the unfortunate position of having a past to compare them with. I, who had practically no past, and whose family had never fallen from glory for the reason that it had had no glory to fall from, thought the times wholly delightful; and anyhow I rather liked camphor.
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But of what use is it to be whitewashed and trim outside, to have pleasant creepers and tidy shutters, when inside one's soul wanders through empty rooms, mournfully shivers in damp and darkness, is hungry and no one brings it food, is cold and no one lights a fire, is miserable and tired and there's no chair to sit on?