Quotes from Elizabeth von Arnim

Well, I for one am unable to imagine how anybody who lives with an intelligent and devoted dog can ever be lonely.

A good thing this was, and that we should be so care-free and irresponsible, enjoying every minute of every day; for it was the Easter of 1914, the last Easter of the old, easy world, and our last, as well as our first, Easter as children together in the little house I had built for happiness.

every day spent here would be a day that made her better, that would bring her nearer to that heaven in which all good and simple souls dwelt while still on earth, the heaven of a serene and quiet mind. Always she had longed to be good, and to help and befriend those who had the same longing but in whom it had been partially crushed by want of opportunity and want of peace.

The Man of Wrath says all women love churchyards. He is fond of sweeping assertions, and is sometimes curiously feminine in his tendency to infer a general principle from a particular instance.

But he felt too confident in Catherine's beautiful nature to be afraid of Ned. Catherine, who loved beauty, who was so much moved by it—witness her rapt face at The Immortal Hour—would never listen to blandishments from anyone with Ned's nose. Besides, Ned was elderly. In spite of the fur rug up to his chin, Christopher had seen that all right. He was an elderly, puffy man. Elderliness and love! He grinned to himself. If only the elderly could see themselves….

Home is the best place when life begins to wobble.

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

What a blessing it is to love books.

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.

Beauty made you love, and love made you beautiful.

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

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.

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.

Why, it would really be being unselfish to go away and be happy for a little, because we would come back so much nicer.

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.

He had the effect on her of a window being thrown open and fresh air and sunlight being let in

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.

It is true she liked him most when he wasn't there, but then she usually liked everybody most when they weren't there.

Now she had taken off her goodness and left it behind her like a heap of rain-sodden clothes, and she only felt joy.

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.

The passion for being for ever with one's fellows, and the fear of being left for a few hours alone, is to me wholly incomprehensible. I can entertain myself quite well for weeks together, hardly aware, except for the pervading peace, that I have been alone at all.

How passionately she longed to be important to somebody again - not important on platforms, not important as an asset in an organisation, but privately important, just to one other person, quite privately, nobody else to know or notice. It didn't seem much to ask in a world so crowded with people, just to have one of them, only one out of all the millions to oneself. Somebody who needed one, who thought of one, who was eager to come to one - oh, oh how dreadfully one wanted to be precious.

Who can begin conventional amiability the first thing in the morning?

When I got to the library I came to a standstill, - ah, the dear room, what happy times I have spent in it rummaging amongst the books, making plans for my garden, building castles in the air, writing, dreaming, doing nothing.