Elizabeth von Arnim > Quotes

“What a blessing it is to love books.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Solitary Summer

“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, In the Mountains

“Beauty made you love, and love made you beautiful.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April

“I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Solitary Summer

“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, The Solitary Summer

“... 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, The Enchanted April

“[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.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen

“It is true she liked him most when he wasn't there, but then she usually liked everybody most when they weren't there.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April

“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.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April

“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, The Solitary Summer

“I'm sure it's wrong to go on being good for too long, till one gets miserable. And I can see you've been good for years and years, because you look so unhappy.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April

“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.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April

“He had the effect on her of a window being thrown open and fresh air and sunlight being let in”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Vera

“This was the simple happiness of complete harmony with her surroundings, the happiness that asks for nothing, that just accepts, just breathes, just is.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April

“Now she had taken off her goodness and left it behind her like a heap of rain-sodden clothes, and she only felt joy.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April

“All the radiance of April in Italy lay gathered together at her feet. The sun poured in on her. The sea lay asleep in it, hardly stirring. Across the bay the lovely mountains, exquisitely different in color, were asleep too in the light; and underneath her window, at the bottom of the flower-starred grass slope from which the wall of castle rose up, was a great cypress, cutting through the delicate blues and violets and rose-colors of the mountains and the sea like a great black sword.

She stared. Such beauty; and she there to see it. Such beauty; and she alive to feel it. Her face was bathed in light.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April

“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, Elizabeth and Her German Garden

“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.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden

“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.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Solitary Summer

“I love tulips better than any other spring flower; they are the embodiment of alert cheerfulness and tidy grace, and next to a hyacinth look like a wholesome, freshly tubbed young girl beside a stout lady whose every movement weighs down the air with patchouli. Their faint, delicate scent is refinement itself; and is there anything in the world more charming than the sprightly way they hold up their little faces to the sun. I have heard them called bold and flaunting, but to me they seem modest grace itself, only always on the alert to enjoy life as much as they can and not be afraid of looking the sun or anything else above them in the face.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden

“Who can begin conventional amiability the first thing in the morning?”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden

“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, The Solitary Summer

“September 15th. - This is the month of quiet days, crimson creepers, and blackberries; of mellow afternoons in the ripening garden; of tea under acacias instead of too shady beeches; of wood fires in the library in chilly evenings.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden

“In bed by herself: adorable condition.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April

“Reading was very important; the proper exercise and development of one's mind was a paramount duty.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April

“What a happy woman I am living in a garden, with books, babies, birds, and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them! Yet my town acquaintances look upon it as imprisonment, and I don't know what besides, and would rend the air with their shrieks if condemned to such a life. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find my happiness so easily. I believe I should always be good if the sun always shone, and could enjoy myself very well in Siberia on a fine day. And what can life in town offer in the way of pleasure to equal the delight of any one of the calm evenings I have had this month sitting alone at the foot of the verandah steps, with the perfume of young larches all about, and the May moon hanging low over the beeches, and the beautiful silence made only more profound in its peace by the croaking of distant frogs and hooting of owls?”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden

“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, The Solitary Summer

“All down the stone steps on either side were periwinkles in full flower, and she could now see what it was that had caught at her the night before and brushed, wet and scented, across her face. It was wistaria. Wistaria and sunshine . . . she remembered the advertisement. Here indeed were both in profusion. The wistaria was tumbling over itself in its excess of life, its prodigality of flowering; and where the pergola ended the sun blazed on scarlet geraniums, bushes of them, and nasturtiums in great heaps, and marigolds so brilliant that they seemed to be burning, and red and pink snapdragons, all outdoing each other in bright, fierce colour. The ground behind these flaming things dropped away in terraces to the sea, each terrace a little orchard, where among the olives grew vines on trellises, and fig-trees, and peach-trees, and cherry-trees. The cherry-trees and peach-trees were in blossom--lovely showers of white and deep rose-colour among the trembling delicacy of the olives; the fig-leaves were just big enough to smell of figs, the vine-buds were only beginning to show. And beneath these trees were groups of blue and purple irises, and bushes of lavender, and grey, sharp cactuses, and the grass was thick with dandelions and daisies, and right down at the bottom was the sea. Colour seemed flung down anyhow, anywhere; every sort of colour piled up in heaps, pouring along in rivers....”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April

“Sometimes callers from a distance invade my solitude, and it is on these occasions that I realize how absolutely alone each individual is, and how far away from his neighbour; and while they talk (generally about babies, past, present, and to come), I fall to wondering at the vast and impassable distance that separates one's own soul from the soul of the person sitting in the next chair.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden

“I wish,' said Rose anxiously, 'I understood you.'
'Don't try,' said Lotty, smiling.
'But I must, because I love you.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April