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Impossible for anyone to conceive the torments of his nights in bed with his beloved one and estranged from her. That turning of backs, that cold space between their two unhappy bodies.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
When I drive to the lupins and see them all spread out as far as eye can reach in perfect beauty of colour and scent and bathed in the mild August sunshine, I feel I must send for somebody to come and look at them with me, and talk about them to me, and share in the pleasure; and when I run over the list of my friends and try to find one who would enjoy them, I am frightened once more at the solitariness in which we each of us live.
Elizabeth von Arnim
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Mrs. Colquhoun was being amiable because she thought Catherine was down and out, and Mrs. Colquhoun was what she was, hard, severe, critical, grudging of happiness, kind to failure so long as it remained failure, simply because there wasn’t a soul in the whole world who really loved her. A devoted husband would have done much to bring out her original goodness; a very devoted husband would have done everything.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
Nobody told me about him my grandfather, and he died when I was six, and yet within the last year or two, that strange Indian summer of remembrance that comes to us in the leisured times when the children have been born and we have time to think, has made me know him perfectly well. It is rather an uncomfortable thought for the grown-up, and especially for the parent, but of a salutary and restraining nature, that though children may not understand what is said and done before them, and have no interest in it at the time, and though they may forget it at once and for years, yet these things that they have seen and heard and not noticed have after all impressed themselves for ever on their minds, and when they are men and women come crowing back with surprising and often painful distinctness, and away frisk all the cherished little illusions in flocks.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
And the summer seems as though it would dream on for ever.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
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.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
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.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
The passion for being for ever with one's fellows, and the fear of being left for a few hours alone, is to me wholly incomprehensible. I can entertain myself quite well for weeks together, hardly aware, except for the pervading peace, that I have been alone at all.
Elizabeth von Arnim
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At night the bottom of the valley looks like water, and the lamps in the little town lying along it like quivering reflections of the stars.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
She was just staring; and her face, as usual, was the face of a patient and disappointed Madonna.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
It is after these rare calls that I experience the only moments of depression from which I ever suffer, and then I am angry at myself, a well-nourished person, for allowing even a single precious hour of life to be spoil: by anything so indifferent. That is the worst of being fed enough, and clothed enough, and warmed enough, and of having everything you can reasonably desire—on the least provocation you are made uncomfortable and unhappy by such abstract discomforts as being shut out from a nearer approach to your neighbour's soul; which is on the face of it foolish, the probability being that he hasn't got one.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
...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!
Elizabeth von Arnim -
How is it that you should feel so vastly superior whenever you do not happen to enter into or understand your neighbour's thoughts when, as a matter of fact, your not being able to do so is less a sign of folly in your neighbour than of incompleteness in yourself?
Elizabeth von Arnim -
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.
Elizabeth von Arnim
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Dogs being great linguists, she quickly picked up English, far more quickly than I picked up German, so we understood each other very well, and couche, schönmachen, and pfui continued for a long time to be my whole vocabulary.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
Once more she had that really rather disgusting suspicion that her life till now had not only been loud but empty.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
...the place I was bound for on my latest pilgrimage was filled with living, first-hand memories of all the enchanted years that lie between two and eighteen. How enchanted those years are is made more and more clear to me the older I grow. There has been nothing in the least like them since; and though I have forgotten most of what happened six months ago, every incident, almost every day of those wonderful long years is perfectly distinct in my memory.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
Surely the colour of London was an exquisite thing. It was like a pearl that late afternoon, something very gentle and pale, with faint blue shadows. And as for its smell, she doubted, indeed, whether heaven itself could smell better, certainly not so interesting. "And anyhow," she said to herself, lifting her head a moment in appreciation, "it can't possibly smell more alive.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
There was nothing, she saw at once, to be hoped for in the way of interest from their clothes. She did not consciously think this, for she was having a violent reaction against beautiful clothes and the slavery they impose on one, her experience being that the instant one had got them they took one in hand and gave one no peace till they had been everywhere and been seen by everybody. You didn't take your clothes to parties; they took you. It was quite a mistake to think that a woman, a really well-dressed woman, wore out her clothes; it was the clothes that wore out the woman--dragging her about at all hours of the day and night. No wonder men stayed young longer. Just new trousers couldn't excite them. She couldn't suppose that even the newest trousers ever behaved like that...
Elizabeth von Arnim -
This radiant weather, when mere living is a joy, and sitting still over the fire out of the question, has been going on for more than a week.
Elizabeth von Arnim
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Such a little difference in Susie's ways and ideas would make them all so happy; such a little change in Peter's habits would make his wife's life radiant. But they all lived blindly, on, each day a day of emptiness, each of those precious days, so crowded with opportunities, and possibilities, and unheeded blessings, and presently life would be behind them, and their chances gone for ever.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
I have a peculiar capacity for doing nothing and yet enjoying myself.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
The longer I live the greater is my respect for manure in all its forms.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
I's lonely to stay inside oneself.
Elizabeth von Arnim