Elizabeth Von Arnim Quotes
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.
Well, I for one am unable to imagine how anybody who lives with an intelligent and devoted dog can every be lonely.
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.
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.
... Why, it would really be being unselfish to go away and be happy for a little, because we would come back so much nicer.
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.
I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow.
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.
It is beautiful, beautiful to give; one of the very most beautiful things in life.
if you have once thoroughly bored somebody it is next to impossible to unbore him.
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.
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.
Reading was very important; the proper exercise and development of one's mind was a paramount duty.
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.
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.
Guests can be, and often are, delightful, but they should never be allowed to get the upper hand.
Oh how warm it makes one to know that there is one person in the world to whom one is everything. A lover is the most precious, the most marvelous possession.
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.
Many are the friendships that have found an unforseeen and sudden end on a journey, and few are those that survive it.
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
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.
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.
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.
This was the simple happiness of complete harmony with her surroundings, the happiness that asks for nothing, that just accepts, just breathes, just is.
Oh, I thought of calling it Journeyings in Germany. It sounds well, and would be correct. Or Jottings from German Journeyings--I haven't quite decided yet... (Minora)