Elizabeth von Arnim Quotes

30 Sourced Quotes

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

Elizabeth von Arnim
I have been much afflicted again lately by visitors... and they gave me to understand that if they had had the arranging of the garden it would have been finished long ago - whereas I don't believe a garden is ever finished. They have all gone now, thank heaven.

Elizabeth von Arnim
There's no safety in love. You risk the whole of life. But the great thing is to risk -to believe, and to risk everything for your belief.

Elizabeth von Arnim
She made him think of his mother, of his nurse, of all things kind and comforting, besides having the attraction of not being his mother or his nurse.

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

Elizabeth von Arnim
For I'm afraid of loneliness; shiveringly, terribly afraid. I don't mean the ordinary physical loneliness, for here I am, deliberately travelled away from London to get to it, to its spaciousness and healing. I mean that awful loneliness of spirit that is the ultimate tragedy of life. When you've got to that, really reached it, without hope, without escape, you die. You just can't bear it, and you die.

Elizabeth von Arnim
On wet days I will go into the thickest parts of the forest, where the pine needles are everlastingly dry, and when the sun shines I'll lie on the heath and see how the broom flares against the clouds. I shall be perpetually happy, because there will be no one to worry me.

Elizabeth von Arnim
If you have once thoroughly bored somebody it is next to impossible to unbore him.

Elizabeth von Arnim
Guests can be, and often are, delightful, but they should never be allowed to get the upper hand.

Elizabeth von Arnim
A man wants a wife who sits still, and not only still but on the same chair every day so that he knows where to find her should he happen to want anything.

Elizabeth von Arnim
He produced the impression of keeping copies of everything he said.

Elizabeth von Arnim
If she and Job had had children they too, by this time, would be all scattered and anyhow. Grown up. Married. And of course making a grandmother of her. Incredible, the things one could be made by other people. Fancy being forced to be a grandmother, whether you liked it or not!

Elizabeth von Arnim
If by nature you are volcanoes, at least be only smoldering ones.

Elizabeth von Arnim
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.

Elizabeth von Arnim
He was the man for trouble. He regretted, of course, that people should get into it, but being in he was their man.

Elizabeth von Arnim
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.

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

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

Elizabeth von Arnim
If your lot makes you cry and be wretched, get rid of it and take another; strike out for yourself; don't listen to the shriek of your relations...don't be afraid of public opinion in the shape of the neighbours in the next house, when all the world is before you new and shining, and everything is possible, if you will only be energetic and independent and seize opportunity by the scruff of the neck.

Elizabeth von Arnim
Sometimes, I recollect, those twenty years with her had seemed long; but that was because, firstly, twenty years were long, and secondly because we are none of us perfect, and thirdly, because a wife, unless she is careful, is apt to get on one's nerves.

Elizabeth von Arnim
She belongs to the winter that is past, to the darkness that is over, and has no part or lot in the life I shall lead for the next six months. Oh, I could dance and sing for joy that the spring is here! What a ressurection of beauty there is in my garden, and of brightest hope in my heart.

Elizabeth von Arnim
Reading was very important; the proper exercise and development of one's mind was a paramount duty.

Elizabeth von Arnim
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.

Elizabeth von Arnim
Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.

Elizabeth von Arnim
She was not reading. Her great dead friends did not seem worth reading that night. They always said the same things now — over and over again they said the same things, and nothing was to be got out of them any more for ever. No doubt they were greater than any one was now, but they had this immense disadvantage, that they were dead.

Elizabeth von Arnim
Who can begin conventional amiability the first thing in the morning?

Elizabeth von Arnim
Mr. Wilkins, a solicitor, encouraged thrift, except that branch of it which got into his food. He did not call that thrift, he called it bad housekeeping.

Elizabeth von Arnim
She usually liked everybody most when they weren't there.

Elizabeth von Arnim
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.

Elizabeth von Arnim
The very way Mrs. Arbuthnot parted her hair suggested a great calm that could only proceed from wisdom.

Elizabeth von Arnim