Cynthia Asquith > Quotes

“I shall leave this farmhouse very soon. The people are all right, but they are people, and therefore insufferable.”
― Cynthia Asquith, The Big Book of the Masters of Horror: 120+ authors and 1000+ stories

“Ah, it was worth ten years of a man’s life to be dead then! Everything was pleasant. I was in a good neighborhood, for all the dead people that lived near me belonged to the best families in the city.”
― Cynthia Asquith, The Big Book of the Masters of Horror: 120+ authors and 1000+ stories

“Why is Leo set on making me feel guilty?’ she wrote. ‘He seems determined to make me miserable by forcing me to think of nothing but poverty, illness and misery – actually to look at it; and he expects the wretched children to do the same. Is there any need for healthy human beings deliberately to dwell on suffering – to seek it out? Must one keep on going to hospitals to listen to the groans of the dying? If you come across a sick fellow creature, by all means take pity on him, do all you possibly can go help him. But need you search him out?”
― Cynthia Asquith, Married to Tolstoy

“The unhappy lonely wives of great men are the wives of whom posterity makes Xantippes
__From the diary of Countess Tolstoy”
― Cynthia Asquith, Married to Tolstoy

“Religion in life is either an amusement and a soporific or a sham and a swindle.”
― Lady Cynthia Asquith, The Big Book of the Masters of Horror: 120+ authors and 1000+ stories

“I sometimes find myself looking at a young child with little short of awe, sir, knowing that within its mind is a scene of peace and paradise of which we older folk have no notion, and which will fade away out of it, as life wears on, like the mere tabernacling of a dream.”
― Cynthia Asquith, The Big Book of the Masters of Horror: 120+ authors and 1000+ stories

“Above all, she could not bear that in sinister complete change in his outlook which was to make him describe beauty as coming, not from God, but from the devil.”
― Cynthia Asquith, Married to Tolstoy

“Whatever was found new in Lazarus’ face and gestures was thought to be some trace of a grave illness and of the shocks recently experienced. Evidently, the destruction wrought by death on the corpse was only arrested by the miraculous power, but its effects were still apparent; and what death had succeeded in doing with Lazarus’ face and body, was like an artist’s unfinished sketch seen under thin glass.”
― Cynthia Asquith, The Big Book of the Masters of Horror: 120+ authors and 1000+ stories

“At times she was sympathetic, at others derisive, as when she called Tolstoy's struggles to live in artificial poverty ‘playing at Robinson Crusoe.’ The defects of her virtues grew more pronounced with the years. The spontaneous candour of her girlhood had been one of her principal attractions to Tolstoy, who thought sincerity the most valuable of all qualities; but as she grew older, she gender to express her opinions too vehemently, or bitterly, as in the written complaint: ‘‘When Leo turned to Christianity, the martyrdom was mine, not his.”
― Cynthia Asquith, Married to Tolstoy

“The wife of a great man forever stands on trial. No verdict is final.”
― Cynthia Asquith, Married to Tolstoy

“She was lovely, and she drove the hearts and the purses of men as a breath drives a thin sheet of flame.”
― Cynthia Asquith, The Big Book of the Masters of Horror: 120+ authors and 1000+ stories

“I use the word smile for lack of a better word, but how to convey the beauty of the indefinable expression that transfigured that time-worn face? Tender triumph; gentle joy, rapturous reverence. What mystery did I witness? It was like iron frost yielding to sunshine -- the thawing of grief in the dawn-radiance of some unsurmisable redemption.”
― Cynthia Asquith