The Pastor's Wife Quotes

“She would go off in the morning with the punt full of books, and spend long glorious days away in the forest lying on the green springy carpet of whortleberries, reading. She would most diligently work at furnishing her empty mind. She would sternly endeavour to train it not to jump.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Pastor's Wife

“And when I'm with you," she said, "I feel as if I were stuffed with—oh, with stars.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Pastor's Wife

“The years lay spread out before her, spacious untouched canvases on which she was presently going to paint the picture of her life. It was to be a very beautiful picture, she said to herself with an extraordinary feeling of proud confidence; not beautiful because of any gifts or skill of hers, for never was a woman more giftless, but because of all the untiring little touches, the ceaseless care for detail, the patient painting out of mistakes; and every touch and every detail was going to be aglow with the bright colours of happiness.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Pastor's Wife

“... but it's fun being alive, isn't it? I feel as if I'd only got to stretch up my hands to all those stars and catch as many of them as I want to.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Pastor's Wife

“Well, she had had the most wonderful summer; she had got that anyhow tucked away up the sleeve of her memory, and could bring it out and look at it when the days were wet and she felt cold and sick.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Pastor's Wife

“You are all the happiness," he said, with an energy of conviction astonishing at half-past nine in the morning, "and all the music, and all the colour, and all the fragrance there is in the world.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Pastor's Wife

“But down from the end of the path it looked so charming that she wished she could paint it in watercolours—the great trees, the tempered sunlight, the glimpse of the old church at one end, the glimpse of the embosomed lake at the other, and in the middle, set out so neatly, with such a grace of spotlessness, the table of her first tea-party.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Pastor's Wife

“Her family held strongly that for daughters to read in the daytime was to be idle. Well, if it was, thought Ingeborg lifting her head, that head that drooped so apologetically at home, with the defiance that distance encourages, then being idle was a blessed thing and the sooner one got away to where one could be it, uninterruptedly, the better.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Pastor's Wife

“She herself had certainly never been more alive. She felt electric. She would not have been surprised if sparks had come crackling out of the tips of her sober gloves.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Pastor's Wife

“What fun it all was, she thought, and how entirely new and delicious being taken care of as though she were a thing that mattered, a precious thing!”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Pastor's Wife

“But whether it was a proper shame for what she had done or a shocking shame for her compunctions in sinning, the Bishop was not permitted that afternoon to discover; because when she had got as far as that she was interrupted by being obliged to faint.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Pastor's Wife

“If you weren't here I wouldn't see it," said Ingram, firmly believing it in the face of the fact that nothing ever escaped his acute vision. "I see all this only through you. You are my eyes. Without you I go blind, I grope about with the light gone out. You don't know what you are to me, you little shining crystal thing—you don't begin to realise it, my dear, my dear sweet Found-at-Last.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Pastor's Wife

“Surely the colour of London was an exquisite thing. It was like a pearl that late afternoon, something very gentle and pale, with faint blue shadows. And as for its smell, she doubted, indeed, whether heaven itself could smell better, certainly not so interesting. "And anyhow," she said to herself, lifting her head a moment in appreciation, "it can't possibly smell more alive.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Pastor's Wife

“Mother must have been kissed too, and she’s still alive …”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Pastor's Wife