Rosamond Lehmann > Quotes

“Advice to Young Journal Keepers. Be lenient with yourself. Conceal your worst faults, leave out your most shameful thoughts, actions, and temptations. Give yourself all the good and interesting qualities you want and haven't got. If you should die young, what comfort would it be to your relatives to read the truth and have to say: It is not a pearl we have lost, but a swine?”
― Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz

“I want to do something absolutely different, or perhaps nothing at all: just stay where I am, in my home, and absorb each hour, each day, and be alone; and read and think; and walk about the garden in the night; and wait, wait...”
― Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz

“It'll all come right. Because, of course, I do believe...I believe - I believe in everything...sun, moon, stars, in seasons - trees, flowers - people, music, life...yes, in life.”
― Rosamond Lehmann

“There was sadness in everything—in the room, in the ringing bird-calls from the garden, in the lit, golden lawn beyond the window, with its single miraculous cherry-tree breaking in immaculate blossom and tossing long foamy sprays against the sky. She was sad to the verge of tears, and yet the sorrow was rich—a suffocating joy.”
― Rosamond Lehmann, Dusty Answer

“Still, now and then they seemed to be holding behind them the surprising, the magic vistas of childhood - the sudden snow at night, whirling and furring without sound against the window; the full moon and all its shadows on the lawn; the Christmas sleigh and reindeer in the sky.”
― Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz

“Yes, we are sure of it. These walls enclose a world. Here is continuity spinning a web from room to room, from year to year. It is safe in this house.”
― Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz

“Another five minutes, thought Olivia, and shut her eyes. Not to fall asleep again; but to go back as it were and do the thing gradually---detach oneself softly, float up serenely from the clinging delectable fringes. Oh, heavenly sleep! Why must one cast it from one, all unprepared, unwilling? Caught out again by Kate in the very act! You're not trying , you could wake up if you wanted to: that was their attitude. And regularly one began the day convicted of inferiority, of a sluggish voluptuous nature, seriously lacking in will-power.”
― Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz

“The fact is, one shouldn't go to parties when one is in love. It makes one act aloof and superior and everyone distrusts you.”
― Rosamond Lehmann

“Un soir qu'elle descendait, d'un pas dansant, vers le fond du jardin, elle se sentit, sous le charme lunaire, changée, forte, exaltée. Au bord de la rivière, elle s'arrêta : l'eau, dans sa course, luisait doucement ; elle la scruta dans tous les sens et la vit entièrement déserte, entièrement à elle seule. Elle retira le peu de vêtements qu'elle portait, et elle entra dedans, plongea bien vite ; l'eau glissa sur son sein, autour de ses épaules, et l'enveloppa tout entière. (...) C'était une douceur exquise d'être nue sous l'emprise glacée de l'eau. En comparaison, le plaisir de nager en costume de bain lui parut méprisable et vulgaire. Nager seule, sous le clair de lune, était un mystère sacré, qui la passionnait. L'eau était amoureuse de son corps ; elle s'abandonnait, tout en y résistant, à sa mordante étreinte ; elle la subissait, bientôt elle la désira; elle était amoureuse de l'eau.”
― Rosamond Lehmann, Dusty Answer

“I have decided to keep a record of my inmost real-self thoughts. Perhaps it will help me to find out what I really am like: horrid, I know: selfish, conceited, and material-minded. For instance, lately whenever I've tried to concentrate on anything serious or beautiful, I've started thinking about the Spencers' dance next week. I am ashamed of my pettiness. I'm going to try to do better this year--develop my character more and not always be thinking about enjoying myself. I've always been so happy, I dread disappointment and unhappiness, but they would be good for me. But I don't want them.”
― Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz

“I think we could all do with a cup of tea.”
― Rosamond Lehmann, The Weather in the Streets

“The present mood in which they sat relaxed was nothing more than the relief of two people coming back to a bombed building once familiar, shared as a dwelling, and finding all over the smashed foundations a rose-ash haze of willow herb. No more, no less. It is a ruin; but suspense at least, at least the need for sterile resolution, have evaporated with the fact of the return. Terror of nothingness contracts before the contemplation of it. It is not, after all, vacancy, but space; an area razed, roped off by time; by time refertilized, sown with a transfiguration, a ruin-haunting, ghost-spun No Man's crop of grace.”
― Rosamond Lehmann, The Echoing Grove