Quotes from Elizabeth von Arnim

Up to now I have had fourteen, but they weren't spread over my life equally, and for years and years at a time I had none. This, when first I began considering my dogs, astonished me; I mean, that for years and years I had none. What was I about, I wondered, to allow myself to be dogless? How was it that there were such long periods during which I wasn't making some good dog happy? Lately

If one could only get hold of the children! I sighed, as I went up the steps into the schoolhouse; catch them young, and put them in a garden, with no older people of their own class for ever teaching them by example what is ugly, and unworthy, and gross.

Put out? My dear Gertrud, I have been thinking of very serious things. You cannot expect me to frolic along paths of thought that lead to mighty and unpleasant truths. Why should I always smile? I am not a Cheshire cat.

oh, wide and splendid world! How good it is to look sometimes across great spaces, to lift one's eyes from narrowness, to feel the large silence that rests on lonely hills!

A RIPE EXPERIENCE OF GERMAN pillows in country places leads me to urge the intending traveller to be sure to take his own. The native pillows are mere bags, in which feathers may have been once. There is no substance in them at all. They are of a horrid flabbiness. And they have, of course, the common drawback of all public pillows, they are haunted by the nightmares of other people. A pillow, it is true, takes up a great deal of room in one's luggage, but

The account of the face treatment that Catherine had undergone at the hands of a quack was taken from a description given to Elizabeth by Katherine Mansfield, her New Zealand cousin, of her own experience in Paris when she was searching for a cure for consumption. This may have been too tragic a source. If Elizabeth needed copy she had, if Frere is to be believed, her own experience to draw on.

THE next morning Catherine went to church for the last time—for when Stephen was in London, and not there to invite her to accompany him, which he solemnly before each separate service did, there would be no more need to go—and for the last time mingled her psalms with Mrs. Colquhoun's.

The evil times had come of eking out, of making do. At least, my husband seemed to regard the times we had arrived at as evil, but that was because he was in the unfortunate position of having a past to compare them with. I, who had practically no past, and whose family had never fallen from glory for the reason that it had had no glory to fall from, thought the times wholly delightful; and anyhow I rather liked camphor.

After being all day with people, how blessed a thing it is not to be with them.

It is so sweet to be sad when one has nothing to be sad about.

those future marigolds, shadowy as they are, and whose seeds are still sleeping at the seedman´s, have shone through my winter days like golden lamps.

No blandishments could make those cats stir if they weren't in the mood, and one does want whatever one is calling to come.

even now, after years of study in the art of holding my tongue, some stray fragment of what I feel does occasionally come out, and then I am at once pulled up and brought to my senses by the well-known cold stare of utter incomprehension, or the look of indulgent superiority that awaits any exposure of a feeling not in the least understood.

Sitting there in the dark, I felt very small, and solitary, and defenceless, alone in a great, big, black world.

The woman has a beak,' he thought, standing red and tongue-tied before her. 'She's a bird of prey. She has got her talons into my Catherine. Linked together! Good God.

She was just staring; and her face, as usual, was the face of a patient and disappointed Madonna.

Nieustaj?co czuj? si? szcz??liwa (na dworze, rzecz jasna, jako ?e w ?rodku jest s?u?ba i meble).

The princess hardly showed herself; Anna was English, besides being more or less of a lunatic — the combination, when you came to think of it, was alarming, — and they soon wearied of pouring into each other's highly sceptical ears descriptions of the splendours of their prosperous days.

W ogrodzie szuka si? oddechu i g??bokiego spokoju; nie ma nikogo; tylko samotne kwiatki i szepcz?ce drzewa.

Mother must have been kissed too, and she's still alive …

The people I love are always somewhere else and not able to come to me.

and just loving him with all her simple young heart and entirely believing in him, had made him, so completely commonplace before in all his utterances, suddenly—at least in the pulpit—sing. Was it acute, personal experience that one needed? Did one only cry out the truth really movingly when under some sort of lash, either of grief or ecstasy?

Virginia had, however, long felt that her mother was not truly religious—not truly and seriously, as she and Stephen were. No doubt she thought she was, and perhaps she was, in some queer way; but were queer ways of being religious permissible? Weren't they as bad, really, as no ways at all?

can never see two people contradicting each other without feeling wretched. Why contradict? Why argue at all? Only one's Best-Beloved, one's Closest and Most Understanding should be contradicted and argued with. How simple to keep quiet with all the rest and agree to everything they say.