Elizabeth Von Arnim Quotes

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.

~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

This was the simple happiness of complete harmony with her surroundings, the happiness that asks for nothing, that just accepts, just breathes, just is.

~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

Why couldn't two unhappy people refresh each other on their way through this dusty business of life by a little talk - real, natural talk, about what they felt, what they would have liked, what they still tried to hope for?

~ 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.

~ 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.

~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

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.

~ 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.

~ 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.

~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

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

~ 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

What a blessing it is to love books.

~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

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

~ 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.

~ 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.

~ 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

~ 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

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.

~ 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

[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.

~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

Many are the friendships that have found an unforseeen and sudden end on a journey, and few are those that survive it.

~ 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.

~ 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.

~ 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.

~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

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)

~ 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.

~ 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.

~ 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

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.

~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

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

~ 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!

~ 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.

~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

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.

~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

Always being there was the essential secret for a wife.

~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

One should continue (of course with dignity) to develop, however old one may be. She had nothing against developing, against further ripeness, because as long as one was alive one was not dead -obviously, decided Mrs. Fisher, and development, change, ripening, were life.

~ Elizabeth Von Arnim