Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther Quotes

“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 my welcome. The man I would love would be the man I could trust to love me for ever. I do not trust you. I did outstay my welcome once. I did get thrown into the gutter, and came near drowning in that sordid place.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

“Give me a book. There is no present I care about but that.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

“It is beautiful, beautiful to give; one of the very most beautiful things in life.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

“My step-mother looked at me at least once on each of these miserable days, and said: 'Rose-Marie, you look very odd. I hope you are not going to have anything expensive. Measles are in Jena, and also the whooping-cough.'
'Which of them is the cheapest?' I inquired.
'Both are beyond our means,' said my step-mother severely.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

“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 one lights a fire, is miserable and tired and there's no chair to sit on?”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

“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, we turn our eyes with all their old eagerness to a point a little further along the road.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

“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, Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

“Eppure l'amore all'inizio è una cosa bella, una cosa dolce e cara. Ma proprio come un gattino, che da piccolo ti delizia con i suoi modi teneri e amabili, con la sua innocenza, morbidezza e mansuetudine, si trasforma con spaventosa rapidità in un gatto che ti artiglia crudelmente. Vorrei sapere se esiste una sola persona al mondo, all'apparenza felice e indifferente, che non abbia ben nascosti sotto abiti e ornamenti i segni degli artigli dell'amore. Credo anche che si tratti di graffi così profondi che sanguinano a lungo, senza rimarginarsi; e quando, dopo anni, finalmente guariscono, rimane sempre una cicatrice, rossa e terribile, che fa trasalire quando inavvertitamente la si tocca.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Lettere di una donna indipendente

“I shall give you lovely food; and Papa says that lovely food is the one thing that ever really makes a man give himself the trouble to rise up and call his wife blessed.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

“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.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

“We build the most outrageous castles in the air. Nothing is certain, and everything is possible.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

“Wissen Sie, was das für ein Segen ist, die Werke eines Dichters zu lesen, seinen Geist zu kennen, das Beste an ihm, und dabei so entfernt von seiner Heimat, seiner Lebensgeschichte oder seinen Briefen zu leben, dass alles Geschwätz über sein Privatleben und Kritik an seiner Moral nicht zu mir gedrungen ist?”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

“Ora so che l'amore è l'unica cosa che valga davvero la pena di avere. Tutto il resto, talento, lavoro, arte, religione, conoscenza e tutti gli altri terreni affanni altro non sono che rimedi con i quali coloro che non amano, coloro che non sono amati, tentano di attenuare le loro pene, di anestetizzarsi.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Lettere di una donna indipendente

“Penso che risulterebbe stancante essere legati per l'eternità al culmine dei momenti più ispirati dei massimi scrittori. Altitudini come quelle sarebbero inadatte a insetti come me. Su questi libri elevati me ne starei aggrappata alla bell'e meglio, con la testa e le ali penzolanti. E forse che anche l'anima non ha voglia, di tanto in tanto, di mettersi in vestaglia?”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Lettere di una donna indipendente

“Penso che un peccatore debba peccare con allegria, oppure non peccare affatto. [...] E' ben misero chi pecca dispiacendosene.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Lettere di una donna indipendente

“Un'amicizia incapace di aiutare potrebbe benissimo fare a meno di esistere.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Lettere di una donna indipendente

“Did I ever tell you how pretty she was? She was so very pretty, and so adorably nimble of tongue. Quick, glancing, vivid, she twinkled in the heavy Jena firmament like some strange little star. She led Papa and me by the nose, and we loved it.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

“Can one be bored in a world so wonderful?”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

“I see no use in thinking of painful past things. They ought always to be forgotten as quickly as possible; if they are not, they have a trick of turning the present sour, and I cling to the present, to the one thing one really has, and like to make it as cheerful as possible—like to get, by industrious squeezing, every drop of honey out of it. Just now I cannot tell you how thankful I am simply to be alive with nothing in my body hurting.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

“There is no help, except what you dig out of your own self; and if I could make you see that I would have shown you all the secrets of life.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

“What I really meant to write to you about today was to tell you that I read your learned and technical and I am sure admirable denouncements of Walt Whitman with a respectful attention due to so much earnestness; and when I had done, and wondered awhile pleasantly at the amount of time for letter-writing the Foreign Office allows its young men, I stretched myself, and got my hat, and went down to the river; and I sat at the water's edge in the middle of a great many buttercups; and there was a little wind; and the little wind knocked the heads of the buttercups together; and it seemed to amuse them, or else something else did, for I do assure you I thought I heard them laugh.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther