Quotes from Ouida

Politics you should banish absolutely—if people are not of one mind about them they are sure to quarrel over them; if they are of one mind no subject can be drearier.

Genius is oftentimes but a poor fool, who clinging to a thing that belongs to no age, Truth, does oftentimes live on a pittance and die in a hospital: but whosoever has the gift to measure aright their generation is invincible —living, they shall enjoy all the vices undetected; and dead, on their tombstones they shall possess all the virtues.

Soon after that he drank some soda-water, and went to bed: I did so too, and, I shame to confess, slept soundly, unhaunted by so much as a dream of the poor patient Bronze, whom we had left in the chilly bleak dawn, alone with his hunger and sorrow. We hear a very great chatter of "sympathy" in this world: is there aught of it, I wonder, that is anything beyond fellow-feeling?

It was passing strange, I thought, that these two grave strong men should be so gentle over a creature who never cared how she wounded, mocked, flouted, or harmed either of them, to please her sport or charm her vanity

They played that wild, strange, ancient game of morra, which with its antics, its vociferation, its twinkling, dazzling, ceaseless movement of the fingers, so utterly bewilders the stranger who watches it. They looked to mo like maniacs. But to be sure, if dogs ruled in the world they would very often raise the cries of " Rabies!" against very many human actions and grimaces.

You are young enough! — and yet, I don't know; it is a popular fallacy that time counts by years. One is old according to the style of one's life, not the length of it.

Days, when you could not stroll on the beach, without finding at your feet a corpse, hastily thrust into the loosened sand, for dogs to gnaw and vultures to make their meal, or look across the harbour without seeing some dead body floating, upright and horrible, in the face of the summer sun.

Hence, being thus suited to the Age which had begotten her, being thus its creature and its likeness, she bad thriven in it as the snake thrives in hot and poisonous waters which for all purer and healthier things breed death.

Ouida's first novel was published in three volumes in 1863, though it had previously been released in serial form as Granville de Vigne in The New Monthly magazine from January 1861 to June 1863, as was the common practice at the time. The author was only twenty-four years old at the time, but was later to claim that this was not her first attempt at writing and that her 1867 novel Idalia was written when she was just sixteen.

Ouida is not afraid to play with gender roles and her explorations of femininity in men and masculinity in women, were considered avant-garde

Sad? Oh, I don't see that; nothing in life is worth calling sad. According to Heraclitus, everything is sad; according to Democritus, nothing is sad. The true secret is to take things as they come, and not trouble yourself sufficiently about anything to give it power to trouble you.

Men are always optimists when they look inwards, and pessimists when they look around them.

If they did not credit it, we did. We knew it was against all maxims of war for Cavalry to act without support, or infantry at hand. We knew that in all probability few indeed, if any of us, would ever come back from that rapid and deadly ride. But the order was given. There were the guns — and away we went, quickening from trot to canter, and from canter to gallop, as we drew nearer to them. On we went, spurring our horses across the space that divided us from those grim fiery mouths.

Nobody, except that wise woman, Rosa Bonheur, ever discerned that animals only do not speak because they are endowed with a discretion far and away over that of blatant, bellowing, gossiping, garrulous Man. "Only a dog," indeed I However, the phrase has a pretty, modest, graceful look, so let it stand. Men never are taken at their own valuation by others; and so I suppose dogs cannot expect to be either.

Only a dog I" Well, dogs cannot lie, or bribe, or don a surplice, or pick a lock, or go bull-baiting in sharemarkets, or preside as chairmen over public companies; we can only, if we are dishonest, run off with a bone in a most open and foolish fashion, and get instantly whipped for our pains So that there is one art at least in which men are decidedly in advance of us; and in deference to that superexcellcnce in stealing,

Animalism," forsooth!—a more unfair word don't exist. When we animals never drink except just enough to satisfy thirst, never eat except when wo have genuine appetites, never indulge in any sort of debauch, and never strain excess till we sink into the slough of satiety, shall "animalism" be a word to designate all that men and women dare to do? "Animalism!" you ought to blush for such a libel on our innocent and reasonable lives when you regard your own

It was with bitter hearts and deadly thoughts that we, the remnant of the Six Hundred, rode back, leaving the flower of the Light Brigade dead or dying before those murderous Russian guns; — and it was all done, all over, in five-and-twenty minutes — less than a fast up-wind fox-hunt would have taken at home!

Nay—when will you do so much as remember that the coward who tortures an animal would murder a human being if he were not afraid of the gallows? When will you see that to teach the hand of a child to stretch out and smother the butterfly, is to teach that hand, when a man's, to steal out and strangle an enemy?

Dogs never have any difficulty in remembering the slightest event or the lightest word that has ever occurred or was ever spoken in their presence. Our power of memory is something marvelous

which might have touched into sympathy, even the coldest nature. But (I do not think one can blame my Lady Molyneux; if she was born without feelings, perhaps she was hardly more responsible for the non-possession of them, than the idiot for the total absence of brain) her mother was not even silenced.

What happiness it seemed to me! How passionately I envied, as I passed, them; all shabby and shaggy though their coats might be I Some of these dogs, doubtless, were sometimes roughly treated; sometimes hungered, and smarted, and were footsore, and sun-heated. But they were free 1—and they had not to go through that dreary desolate pantomime of mimicked gayety, while their hearts were breaking!

And of how he would hang the throat of Patrasche with a collar of gold, and place him on his right hand, and say to the people, "This was once my only friend

I liked my new owner, as I have said, very quickly; and I liked all his friends and companions the "swells" as your snobs will call them; the men with the pale, handsome faces, borne by crusaders and cavaliers before them; the men with the gentle, quiet ways, and the contemptuous ring in their voices, and the easy indolent insolence to all forms of pretension ; and the frank, kindly, generous hearts for those that know them well; and the manner that is so natural to them,

With which he deposited two or three of the penny numbers of fiction on the little table, and regarded himself, it was evident, as a person of princely liberality.