125 Quotes by Elizabeth von Arnim

"We are neither of us wise, but it is surprising how talking to a friend, even to a friend as unwise as yourself, clears up your brains and lets in new light."

"[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 you by the wayside."

"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."

"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"

"Give me a book. There is no present I care about but that."

"How good it is to look sometimes across great spaces, to lift one’s eyes from narrowness, to feel the large silence that rests on lonely hills!"

"...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 been nothing in the least like them since; and though I have forgotten most of what happened six months ago, every incident, almost every day of those wonderful long years is perfectly distinct in my memory."

"Really I have been thankful on my knees every time I have not said what I was going to say when I’ve been annoyed."

"I have a peculiar capacity for doing nothing and yet enjoying myself."

"It is not graceful, and it makes one hot; but it is a blessed sort of work, and if Eve had had a spade in Paradise and known what to do with it, we should not have had all that sad business of the apple."