Sari La Rue

“and knew that here I might read or dream or idle exactly as I chose with never a creature to disturb me, how grateful I felt to the kindly Fate that has brought me here and given me a heart to understand my own blessedness,”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April: A Trilogy

“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

“And then, as to the mastication of the food, the mental process answering to this is simply thinking over what we read. This is a very much greater exertion of mind than the mere passive taking in the contents of our Author. So much greater an exertion is it, that, as Coleridge says, the mind often “angrily refuses” to put itself to such trouble— so much greater, that we are far too apt to neglect it altogether, and go on pouring in fresh food on the top of the undigested masses already lying there, till the unfortunate mind is fairly swamped under the flood. But the greater the exertion the more valuable, we may be sure, is the effect. One hour of steady thinking over a subject (a solitary walk is as good an opportunity for the process as any other) is worth two or three of reading only. And just consider another effect of this thorough digestion of the books we read; I mean the arranging and “ticketing,” so to speak, of the subjects in our minds, so that we can readily refer to them when we want them.”
― Lewis Carroll, On Corpulence: Feeding the Body and Feeding the Mind

“If it would not have been true to say, conventionally, that no party was complete without her, yet it certainly seemed, from this time, that she was incomplete without a party. She was the starving wolf after the sledge in which sat the gay world. If the sledge escaped her, she was left to face darkness, snow, wintry winds, loneliness.”
― Robert Smythe Hichens, The Folly of Eustace