Best 55 quotes of Elizabeth Von Arnim on MyQuotes

Elizabeth Von Arnim

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    And the summer seems as though it would dream on for ever.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    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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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    But it is impossible, I find, to tidy books without ending by sitting on the floor in the middle of a great untidiness and reading.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    For I'm afraid of loneliness; shiveringly, terribly afraid. I don't mean the ordinary physical loneliness, for here I am, deliberately travelled away from London to get to it, to its spaciousness and healing. I mean that awful loneliness of spirit that is the ultimate tragedy of life. When you've got to that, really reached it, without hope, without escape, you die. You just can't bear it, and you die.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    Guests can be, and often are, delightful, but they should never be allowed to get the upper hand.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    If one believed in angels one would feel that they must love us best when we are asleep and cannot hurt each other; and what a mercy it is that once in every twenty-four hours we are too utterly weary to go on being unkind.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    if you have once thoroughly bored somebody it is next to impossible to unbore him.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    If your lot makes you cry and be wretched, get rid of it and take another; strike out for yourself; don't listen to the shriek of your relations...don't be afraid of public opinion in the shape of the neighbours in the next house, when all the world is before you new and shining, and everything is possible, if you will only be energetic and independent and seize opportunity by the scruff of the neck.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    I have been much afflicted again lately by visitors . . . and they gave me to understand that if they had had the arranging of the garden it would have been finished long ago - whereas I don't believe a garden is ever finished. They have all gone now, thank heaven.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    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.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    It is beautiful, beautiful to give; one of the very most beautiful things in life.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    I would recommend to those persons who are inclined to stagnate, whose blood is beginning to thicken sluggishly in their veins, to try keeping four dogs, two of which are puppies.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    Keep quiet and say one's prayers-certainly not merely the best, but the only things to do if one would be truly happy; but, ashamed of asking when I have received so much, the only form of prayer I would use would be a form of thanksgiving.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    Life is an admirable arrangement, isn't it, little mother. It is so clever of it to have June in every year and a morning in every day, let alone things like birds, and Shakespeare, and one's work.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    Love isn't decent. Love is glorious and shameless.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    On wet days I will go into the thickest parts of the forest, where the pine needles are everlastingly dry, and when the sun shines I'll lie on the heath and see how the broom flares against the clouds. I shall be perpetually happy, because there will be no one to worry me.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    Reading was very important; the proper exercise and development of one's mind was a paramount duty.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    She belongs to the winter that is past, to the darkness that is over, and has no part or lot in the life I shall lead for the next six months. Oh, I could dance and sing for joy that the spring is here! What a ressurection of beauty there is in my garden, and of brightest hope in my heart.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    She had been dragged in the most humiliating of all dusts, the dust reserved for older women who let themselves be approached, on amorous lines, by boys... It had all been pure vanity, all just a wish, in these waning days of hers, still to feel power, still to have the assurance of her beauty and its effects.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    She made him think of his mother, of his nurse, of all things kind and comforting, besides having the attraction of not being his mother or his nurse.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    Strange that the vanity which accompanies beauty - excusable, perhaps, when there is such great beauty, or at any rate understandable - should persist after the beauty is gone.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    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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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    [Walking] is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the life of things. It is the one way of freedom. If you go to a place on anything but your own feet you are taken there too fast, and miss a thousand delicate joys that were waiting for you by the wayside.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    Well, I for one am unable to imagine how anybody who lives with an intelligent and devoted dog can every be lonely.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    When I got to the library I came to a standstill, - ah, the dear room, what happy times I have spent in it rummaging amongst the books, making plans for my garden, building castles in the air, writing, dreaming, doing nothing.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    ... Why, it would really be being unselfish to go away and be happy for a little, because we would come back so much nicer.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    ... without it (love), without, anyhow, the capacity for it, people didn't seem to be much good. Dry as old bones, cold as stones, they seemed to become, when love was done; inhuman, indifferent, self-absorbed, numb.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    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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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    Always being there was the essential secret for a wife.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    Ces femmes acceptent de se faire battre avec une simplicité digne des plus grands éloges. Loin de se sentir insultées, elles admirent la force et l'énergie d'hommes capables de leur administrer des corrections aussi sonores. En Russie, les hommes ne sont pas seulement autorisés à battre leurs femmes, ils ont appris dès le catéchisme - et on le leur a rappelé lors de la confirmation -, qu'il est nécessaire de les battre au moins une fois la semaine si l'on est vraiment soucieux de leur santé et de leur bien être.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    Fortunately, though she was hungry, she didn't mind missing a meal. Life was full of meals. They took up an enormous proportion of one's time.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    From "The Jasmine Farm" by Elizabeth von Arnim, c 1934: "...except for a little trickle of water somewhere near, and the piping, on an oleander bush, of a solitary bird, so great a stillness surrounded her that in the whole world there might have been no one but herself. Relaxed she sat, her hands palm upwards on her lap, her mouth open because she was too tired to keep it shut. If she had known it, she was being exquisitely welcomed. The scented air, floating past her, lingered to pat her face. From a row of Madonna lilies, under the windows of the house, came fragrance, crossing the grass to greet her. Slanting shadows cooled her. The bird piped away, as if to her alone, songs of wisdom and good cheer. She was surrounded, companioned, pressed upon by beauty; and, for all she saw of it, it might have been Tottenham Court Road in a fog. 'Lift up your heart,' something whispered--'foolish woman, lift up your heart.' But of what use is it to exhort the absorbed, those who are steeped in their own particular tragedies, to do things like that? She heard the whisper, she recognised that familiar words were drifting through her mind, and all she did about it was listlessly to wonder that anybody had enough energy to lift up anything.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    He had no idea that he never went out of the house without her blessing going with him too, hovering, like a little echo of finished love, round that once dear head

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    How they had dreamed together, he and she... how they had planned, and laughed, and loved. They had lived for a while in the very heart of poetry.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    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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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    In this part of the world, the more you are pleased to see a person, the less is he pleased to see you; whereas if you are disagreeable, he will grow pleasant visibly, his countenance expanding into wider amiability the more your own is stiff and sour.

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    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.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    ...listening with absorbed attention more to her voice than to what she was saying, and thinking how like she was, flowering through her voice into beauty in the darkness, to some butterflies he had come across in the Swiss mountains the summer before. When they were folded up they were grey, mothlike creatures that one might easily overlook, but directly they opened their wings they became the loveliest things in the world, all rose-colour or heavenly blue. So had she been to him in the daylight that afternoon,--an ordinary woman, not in any way noticeable; but now listen to her, opening into beauty on the wings of her voice!

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    Love is not a thing you can pick up and throw into the gutter and pick up again as the fancy takes you. I am a person, very unfortunately for you, with a quite peculiar dread of thrusting myself or my affections on any one, of in any way outstaying my welcome. The man I would love would be the man I could trust to love me for ever. I do not trust you. I did outstay my welcome once. I did get thrown into the gutter, and came near drowning in that sordid place.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    No one ever said aloud any of the kinds of things he was so constantly thinking, because no one in the parish, not Alice, not Lady Higgs, not anybody, ever seemed to see the things he saw. If they thought as he did, if they saw what he did, they never mentioned it; and to have things which are precious to one eternally unmentioned makes one, he had long discovered, lonely. These August nights, for instance--quite remarkably and unusually beautiful, warm and velvety as he had never known them, ushered in each evening by the most astonishing variety of splendid sunsets--nobody had said a single word about them. They might have been February ones, for all the notice they got. Sometimes he climbed up to the top of Burdon Down towards evening, and stood staring in amazement at what looked like heaven let loose in flames over England; but always he stood alone, always there was no one but himself up there, and no one afterwards, when he descended from his heights, seemed to be aware that anything unusual had been going on.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    ...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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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    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 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.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    She would go off in the morning with the punt full of books, and spend long glorious days away in the forest lying on the green springy carpet of whortleberries, reading. She would most diligently work at furnishing her empty mind. She would sternly endeavour to train it not to jump.

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    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.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    Submission to what people call their 'lot' is simply ignoble. If your lot makes you cry and be wretched, get rid of it and take another.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    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.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    The only thing to do with one's old sorrows is to tuck them up neatly in their shroud and turn one's face away from their grave towards what is coming next.

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    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.

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    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    The years lay spread out before her, spacious untouched canvases on which she was presently going to paint the picture of her life. It was to be a very beautiful picture, she said to herself with an extraordinary feeling of proud confidence; not beautiful because of any gifts or skill of hers, for never was a woman more giftless, but because of all the untiring little touches, the ceaseless care for detail, the patient painting out of mistakes; and every touch and every detail was going to be aglow with the bright colours of happiness.