Alice Meynell Quotes

31 Sourced Quotes

Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name.

Alice Meynell
If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, so there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds.

Alice Meynell
Our fathers valued change for the sake of its results; we value it in the act.

Alice Meynell
Recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year. Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind.

Alice Meynell
Children have a fastidiousness that time is slow to cure. It is to be wondered, for example, whether if the elderly were half as hungry as children are they would yet find so many things at table to be detestable.

Alice Meynell
We talk of sunshine and moonshine, but not of cloud-shine, which is yet one of the illuminations of our skies. A shining cloud is one of the most majestic of all secondary lights.

Alice Meynell
I have known some grim bells, with not a single joyous note in the whole peal, so forced to hurry for a human festival, with their harshness made light of, as though the Bishop of Hereford had again been forced to dance in his boots by a merry highwayman.

Alice Meynell
A child is beset with long traditions. And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mere adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it further back -- it is already so far.

Alice Meynell
It is principally for the sake of the leg that a change in the dress of man is so much to be desired. The leg is the best part of the figure and the best leg is the man s. Man should no longer disguise the long lines, the strong forms, in those lengths of piping or tubing that are of all garments the most stupid.

Alice Meynell
Spring and autumn are inconsiderable events in a landscape compared with the shadows of a cloud.

Alice Meynell
If night comes without thee
She is more cruel than day.

Alice Meynell
It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, when Nature has lapsed, to replace Nature.

Alice Meynell
For man, woman, and child the tender, irregular, sensitive, living foot, which does not even stand with all its little surface on the ground, and which makes no base to satisfy an architectural eye, is, as it were, the unexpected thing.... nothing makes a more helpless and unsymmetrical sign than does a naked foot.

Alice Meynell
There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between a woman and a child, the little breath hurrying beside the longer, as a child's foot runs.

Alice Meynell
With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets have all but outsung the bell. The inarticulate bell has found too much interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her inaccessible utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The bell, like the bird, is a musician pestered with literature.

Alice Meynell
There is something very cheerful and courageous in the setting-out of a child on a journey of speech with so small baggage and with so much confidence...

Alice Meynell
In the case of women, it is of the living and unpublished blood that the violent world has professed to be delicate and ashamed. See the curious history of the political rights of woman under the Revolution. On the scaffold she enjoyed an ungrudged share in the fortunes of party. Political life might be denied her, but that seems a trifle when you consider how generously she was permitted political death.

Alice Meynell
Tender, too, is the silence of human feet. You have but to pass a season amongst the barefooted to find that man, who, shod, makes so much ado, is naturally as silent as snow.

Alice Meynell
She walks—the lady of my delight—
A shepherdess of sheep.
Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white;
She keeps them from the steep

Alice Meynell
Rich meanings of the prophet-Spring adorn,
Unseen, this colourless sky of folded showers,
And folded winds; no blossom in the bowers;
A poet's face asleep in this grey morn.
Now in the midst of the old world forlorn
A mystic child is set in these still hours.
I keep this time, even before the flowers,
Sacred to all the young and the unborn.

Alice Meynell
I come from nothing; but from where
Come the undying thoughts I bear?

Alice Meynell
Play is not for every hour of the day, or for any hour taken at random. There is a tide in the affairs of children. Civilization is cruel in sending them to bed at the most stimulating time of dusk.

Alice Meynell
Rome in the ages, dimmed with all her towers,
Floats in the mist, a little cloud at tether.

Alice Meynell
I came from nothing, but from where
Come these undying thoughts I bear?

Alice Meynell
O daisy mine, what will it be to look
From God's side even of such a simple thing?

Alice Meynell
Terrestrial scenery is much, but it is not all. Men go in search of it; but the celestial scenery journeys to them; it goes its way round the world. It has no nation, it costs no wearinesss, it knows no bonds.

Alice Meynell
The feet should have more of the acquaintance of earth, and know more of flowers, freshness, cool brooks, wild thyme, and salt sand than does anything else about us.... It is only the entirely unshod that have lively feet.

Alice Meynell
Assuredly it would be a pity if laughter should ever become, like rhetoric and the arts, a habit.

Alice Meynell
The true colour of life is the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest colour of the unpublished blood.

Alice Meynell
I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong, I shun the thought that lurks in all delight — The thought of thee—and in the blue Heaven's height, And in the sweetest passage of a song.

Alice Meynell