Elizabeth von Arnim Quotes
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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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Happy? Poor, ordinary, everyday word. But what could one say, how could one describe it? It was as though she could hardly stay inside herself, it was as though she were too small to hold so much of joy, it was as though she were washed through with light. And how astonishing to feel this sheer bliss, for here she was, not doing and not going to do a single unselfish thing, not going to do a thing she didn't want to do. ... Now she had taken off all her goodness and left it behind her like a heap in rain-sodden clothes, and she only felt joy.
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Who can begin conventional amiability the first thing in the morning?
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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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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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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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Lewes was waiting, always Lewes, making profound and idiotic comments on everything, and wanting to sit up half the night and reason. Reason! He was sick of reason. He wanted some one he could be romantic with, and sentimental with, and poetic, and—yes, religious with, if he felt like it, without having to feel ashamed.
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I never could see that delicacy of constitution is pretty, either in plants or women. No doubt there are many lovely flowers to be had by heat and constant coaxing, but then for each of these there are fifty others still lovelier that will gratefully grow in God's wholesome air and are blessed in return with a far greater intensity of scent and colour.
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But he felt too confident in Catherine’s beautiful nature to be afraid of Ned. Catherine, who loved beauty, who was so much moved by it—witness her rapt face at The Immortal Hour—would never listen to blandishments from anyone with Ned’s nose. Besides, Ned was elderly. In spite of the fur rug up to his chin, Christopher had seen that all right. He was an elderly, puffy man. Elderliness and love! He grinned to himself. If only the elderly could see themselves….
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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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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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A great need of something to lean on, and a great weariness of independence and responsibility took possession of my soul; and looking round for support and comfort in that transitory mood, the emptiness of the present and the blankness of the future sent me back to the past with all its ghosts.
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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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Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.
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THE next morning Catherine went to church for the last time—for when Stephen was in London, and not there to invite her to accompany him, which he solemnly before each separate service did, there would be no more need to go—and for the last time mingled her psalms with Mrs. Colquhoun’s.
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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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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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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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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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...oh, wide and splendid world! How good it is to look sometimes across great spaces, to lift one's eyes from narrowness, to feel the large silence that rests on lonely hills!
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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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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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Guests can be, and often are, delightful, but they should never be allowed to get the upper hand.
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What a blessing it is to love books. Everybody must love something, and I know of no objects of love that give such substantial and unfailing returns as books and a garden.