Elizabeth von Arnim Quotes
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It is not graceful, and it makes one hot; but it is a blessed sort of work, and if Eve had had a spade in Paradise and known what to do with it, we should not have had all that sad business of the apple.
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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.
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A good thing this was, and that we should be so care-free and irresponsible, enjoying every minute of every day; for it was the Easter of 1914, the last Easter of the old, easy world, and our last, as well as our first, Easter as children together in the little house I had built for happiness.
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Love isn't decent. Love is glorious and shameless.
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..all forms of needlework of the fancy order are inventions of the evil one for keeping the foolish from applying their hearts to wisdom.
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I'm so glad I didn't die on the various occasions I have earnestly wished I might, for I would have missed a lot of lovely weather.
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She had not had a question like that in her mind before. It had made her feel lonely. She wanted to be alone, but not lonely. That was very different; that was something that ached and hurt dreadfully right inside one. It was what one dreaded most. It was what made one go to so many parties; and lately even the parties had seemed once or twice not to be a perfectly certain protection. Was it possible that loneliness had nothing to do with circumstances, but only with the way one met them? Perhaps, she had thought, she had better go to bed. She couldn’t be very well.
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For years she had been able to be happy only by forgetting happiness.
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Things were a little untidy, but what did that matter? It was possible to become the slave of things; possible to miss life in preparation for living.
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Isn't it a mercy that we never get cured of being expectant? It makes life so bearable. However regularly we are disappointed and nothing whatever happens, after the first blow has fallen, after the first catch of the breath, the first gulp of misery, we turn our eyes with all their old eagerness to a point a little further along the road.
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Humility, and the most patient perseverance, seem almost as necessary in gardening as rain and sunshine, and every failure must be used as a stepping-stone to something better.
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Her family held strongly that for daughters to read in the daytime was to be idle. Well, if it was, thought Ingeborg lifting her head, that head that drooped so apologetically at home, with the defiance that distance encourages, then being idle was a blessed thing and the sooner one got away to where one could be it, uninterruptedly, the better.
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What a blessing it is to love books.
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And there they were, arrived; and it was San Salvatore; and their suit-cases were waiting for them; and they had not been murdered.
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Up to now I have had fourteen, but they weren’t spread over my life equally, and for years and years at a time I had none. This, when first I began considering my dogs, astonished me; I mean, that for years and years I had none. What was I about, I wondered, to allow myself to be dogless? How was it that there were such long periods during which I wasn’t making some good dog happy?
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Sometimes callers from a distance invade my solitude, and it is on these occasions that I realize how absolutely alone each individual is, and how far away from his neighbour; and while they talk (generally about babies, past, present, and to come), I fall to wondering at the vast and impassable distance that separates one's own soul from the soul of the person sitting in the next chair.
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To Those Who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine. Small mediaeval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be Let furnished for the month of April. Necessary servants remain. Z, Box 1000, The Times.
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In the evening, when everything is tired and quiet, I sit with Walt Whitman by the rose beds and listen to what that lonely and beautiful spirit has to tell me of night, sleep, death, and the stars. This dusky, silent hour is his; and this is the time when I can best hear the beatings of that most tender and generous heart.
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Always being there was the essential secret for a wife.
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True she was old, true she was unbeautiful, true she therefore had no reason to smile, but kind ladies smiled, reason or no. They smiled not because they were happy but because they wished to make happy.