Quotes by Elizabeth von Arnim

About Elizabeth von Arnim:

Elizabeth von Arnim is now invariably referred to as Elizabeth von Arnim. She also wrote under the pen name Alice Cholmondeley.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

In the eighties, when she chiefly flourished, husbands were taken seriously, as the only real obstacles to sin. Beds too, if they had to be mentioned, were approached with caution; and a decent reserve prevented them and husbands ever being spoken of...

Elizabeth von Arnim

One should continue (of course with dignity) to develop, however old one may be. She had nothing against developing, against further ripeness, because as long as one was alive one was not dead -obviously, decided Mrs. Fisher, and development, change,...

Elizabeth von Arnim

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

Reading was very important; the proper exercise and development of one's mind was a paramount duty.

Elizabeth von Arnim

He had no idea that he never went out of the house without her blessing going with him too, hovering, like a little echo of finished love, round that once dear head

Elizabeth von Arnim

Always being there was the essential secret for a wife.

Elizabeth von Arnim

...the place I was bound for on my latest pilgrimage was filled with living, first-hand memories of all the enchanted years that lie between two and eighteen. How enchanted those years are is made more and more clear to me the older I grow. There has...

Elizabeth von Arnim

Oh, I thought of calling it Journeyings in Germany. It sounds well, and would be correct. Or Jottings from German Journeyings--I haven't quite decided yet... (Minora)

Elizabeth von Arnim

Nobody told me about him [my grandfather], and he died when I was six, and yet within the last year or two, that strange Indian summer of remembrance that comes to us in the leisured times when the children have been born and we have time to think, h...

Elizabeth von Arnim

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 ...

Elizabeth von Arnim

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), ...

Elizabeth von Arnim

If your lot makes you cry and be wretched, get rid of it and take another; strike out for yourself; don't listen to the shriek of your relations...don't be afraid of public opinion in the shape of the neighbours in the next house, when all the world ...

Elizabeth von Arnim

It is beautiful, beautiful to give; one of the very most beautiful things in life.

Elizabeth von Arnim

Love is not a thing you can pick up and throw into the gutter and pick up again as the fancy takes you. I am a person, very unfortunately for you, with a quite peculiar dread of thrusting myself or my affections on any one, of in any way outstaying m...

Elizabeth von Arnim

Isn't it a mercy that we never get cured of being expectant? It makes life so bearable. However regularly we are disappointed and nothing whatever happens, after the first blow has fallen, after the first catch of the breath, the first gulp of misery...

Elizabeth von Arnim

Oh how warm it makes one to know that there is one person in the world to whom one is everything. A lover is the most precious, the most marvelous possession.

Elizabeth von Arnim

But of what use is it to be whitewashed and trim outside, to have pleasant creepers and tidy shutters, when inside one's soul wanders through empty rooms, mournfully shivers in damp and darkness, is hungry and no one brings it food, is cold and no on...

Elizabeth von Arnim

...listening with absorbed attention more to her voice than to what she was saying, and thinking how like she was, flowering through her voice into beauty in the darkness, to some butterflies he had come across in the Swiss mountains the summer befor...

Elizabeth von Arnim

[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 ...

Elizabeth von Arnim

There's no safety in love. You risk the whole of life. But the great thing is to risk -to believe, and to risk everything for your belief.

Elizabeth von Arnim

Author Bio

  • NameElizabeth von Arnim
  • DescriptionAustralian writer
  • AliasesMary Annette Beauchamp; Alice Cholmondeley
  • BornAugust 31, 1866
  • DiedFebruary 9, 1941
  • CountryUnited Kingdom; Germany
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist