Natalie Dykstra > Quotes

“There, Clover found the "gardens and great trees and old cottages...so beautiful" that seeing them exhausted her. It was as if, she joked with her husband, "this English world is a huge stage-play got up only to amuse Americans. It is obviously unreal, eccentric, and taken out of novels.”
― Natalie Dykstra, Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life

“Our faith might cause our light to shine on some other heart which as yet had no light of its own.”
― Natalie Dykstra, Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner

“Belle collected experiences and impressions almost as if they were objects that she could put in her hand.”
― Natalie Dykstra, Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner

“poem by her friend Thomas Bailey Aldrich, the longtime editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Its lines read like a brace against failure: “Build as thou will—unspoiled by praise or blame / Build as thou will; and as thy light is given / Then if at last the airy structure fall / Divide & vanish—Take thyself no shame—/ They fail, and they alone, who have not striven.”
― Natalie Dykstra, Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner

“Isn’t it odd how much more one sees in a photograph than in real life? —VIRGINIA WOOLF”
― Natalie Dykstra, Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life