The Enchanted April (Warbler Classics Annotated Edition)

by Elizabeth von Arnim

I can’t see the least point in being in authority at the price of one’s liberty.”

They left off talking. They ceased to mention heaven. They were just cups of acceptance.

Would she never get away from being waited on, being made comfortable, being asked where she wanted things put, having to say thank you?

Sometimes it was just as if she didn’t belong to herself, wasn’t her own at all, but was regarded as a universal thing, a sort of beauty-of-all-work.

It gave her no pleasure to outdo other women; she didn’t want their tiresome men.

She herself drank wine, but with what moderation: one meal, one glass. And she was sixty-five, and might properly, and even beneficially, have had at least two.

I hate authors. I wouldn’t mind them so much if they didn’t write books.

May scorched and withered; March was restless, and could be hard and cold in its brightness; but April came along softly like a blessing, and if it were a fine April it was so beautiful that it was impossible not to feel different, not to feel stirred and touched.

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, ripening, were life.

It is true she liked him most when he wasn’t there, but then she usually liked everybody most when they weren’t there.

How passionately she longed to be important to somebody again—not important on platforms, not important as an asset in an organization, but privately important, just to one other person, quite privately, nobody else to know or notice. It didn’t seem much to ask in a world so crowded with people, just to have one of them, only one out of all the millions, to oneself. Somebody who needed one, who thought of one, who was eager to come to one—oh, oh how dreadfully one wanted to be precious!

How nice people really were. When would she leave off making mistakes about them?

How warm, though, things like admiration and appreciation made one feel, how capable of really deserving them, how different, how glowing. They seemed to quicken unsuspected faculties into life.

Anywhere at that moment, among all the well-known beauties, she would have been lovely. Nobody could have put her in the shade, blown out her light that evening; she was too evidently shining.