Quotes from Elswyth Thane

It's nice to be loved for one's faults and not one's virtues! ...Knowing that whatever you do or however badly you behave, he still feels the way he said just now. But if people really love each other their faults don't matter, said Bracken..Dinah regarded him with large, serious eyes. I wonder how many people could say that, she murmured.

A house you came to love was like a person, and loved you back, and then you belonged to it forever.

There, there, she said. Don't take it so hard, Dee. Wars don't last forever. I know. I can remember...

You will not always be happy, my dear, however wise you are--I wasn't--but always take what comes to you--don't fight life, Camilla, accept it with grace...

They were so young, so gloriously, obliviously young, that it hurt to look at them.

She knew by some sure instinct that when you had come right up against it, as Jeff had, you had no use for people who advised you to brace up, or who pointed out bright spots. She know that there is nothing so infuriating, when you are bearing all you can, as shallow, unrealistic optimism from someone who has not experienced the same disaster.

It is always the Germans who cause the trouble, what is it about Germans that they must molest and oppress?... They have never been civilized, said Sosthene...They were never conquered by Roman. They remain barbarians. Phoebe stared at him. It was a viewpoint... One is perhaps inclined to forget that even here in Britain that were four hundred years of the Pax Romana, he said gently. In Germany, no -- only the Vandals and the Goths. Every so often they burst out. It is in the breed.

I've seen you by candlelight, and midday, and firelight--and in a thunderstorm. And if I were struck blind as I stand here I would see you till I die as you are now, with tears on your cheeks, because I don't take you in my arms and fight the whole boiling lot of them for you!

He had been amused, and sometimes stimulated, and once or twice rather attracted, but he had never been stirred as this honest, laughing Virginia girl had stirred him, with her level green gaze and her odd little dignity, and her sweet reposefulness which was just her breeding.

He laid her hands, palms upward, against his face, and she sat looking down at his bent head, a little disturbed in her soul that he should fling away his principles and his convictions quite so heedlessly for her sake. Mr. Murray, for instance, seemed not to have altered his chosen course a single degree because of Eden. Of course Mr. Murray was a Yankee. Virginia men, she had heard, were more considerate.

Any time I'm happier with you drowned in the river, I belong in the Asylum.

Laurel for you—can you stay on?