-
Thus does good fortune follow on the steps of the reckless.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
There is nothing so absolutely bracing for the soul as the frequent turning of one's back on duties.
Elizabeth von Arnim
-
Reading was very important; the proper exercise and development of one's mind was a paramount duty.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
Put out? My dear Gertrud, I have been thinking of very serious things. You cannot expect me to frolic along paths of thought that lead to mighty and unpleasant truths. Why should I always smile? I am not a Cheshire cat.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
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.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
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.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
Love isn't decent. Love is glorious and shameless.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
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.
Elizabeth von Arnim
-
Oh, delight, delight to think one didn't die this time, that one isn't going to die this time after all, but is going to get better, going to live, going presently to be quite well again and able to go back to one's friends, to the people who still love one...
Elizabeth von Arnim -
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.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
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?
Elizabeth von Arnim -
Always being there was the essential secret for a wife.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
I was for ever making plans, and if nothing came of them, what did it matter? The mere making had been a joy.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
..all forms of needlework of the fancy order are inventions of the evil one for keeping the foolish from applying their hearts to wisdom.
Elizabeth von Arnim
-
Thoreau has been my companion for some days past, it having struck me as more appropriate to bring him out to a pond than to read him, as was hitherto my habit, on Sunday mornings in the garden. He is a person who loves the open air, and will refuse to give you much pleasure if you try to read him amid the pomp and circumstance of upholstery; but out in the sun, and especially by this pond, he is delightful, and we spend the happiest hours together, he making statements, and I either agreeing heartily, or just laughing and reserving my opinion till I shall have more ripely considered the thing.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
He thought her delightful, - freckles, picnic-untidiness and all.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
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.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
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.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
And there they were, arrived; and it was San Salvatore; and their suit-cases were waiting for them; and they had not been murdered.
Elizabeth von Arnim -
Out there on the plain there is silence, and where there is silence I have discovered there.
Elizabeth von Arnim