In the Mountains Quotes

“But it is impossible, I find, to tidy books without ending by sitting on the floor in the middle of a great untidiness and reading.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, In the Mountains

“For I'm afraid of loneliness; shiveringly, terribly afraid. I don't mean the ordinary physical loneliness, for here I am, deliberately travelled away from London to get to it, to its spaciousness and healing. I mean that awful loneliness of spirit that is the ultimate tragedy of life. When you've got to that, really reached it, without hope, without escape, you die. You just can't bear it, and you die.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, In the Mountains

“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, In the Mountains

“I don't believe there was ever anybody who loved being happy as much as I did. What I mean is that I was so acutely conscious of being happy, so appreciative of it; that I wasn't ever bored, and was always and continuously grateful for the whole delicious loveliness of the world.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, In the Mountains

“I's lonely to stay inside oneself.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, In the Mountains

“And then when I got home I burrowed about among my books, arranging their volumes and loving the feel of them.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, In the Mountains

“At night the bottom of the valley looks like water, and the lamps in the little town lying along it like quivering reflections of the stars.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, In the Mountains

“I wonder why I write about these things. As if I didn't know them! Why do I tell myself in writing what I already so well know? Don't I know about the mountain, and the brimming cup of blue light? It is because, I suppose, it's lonely to stay inside oneself. One has to come out and talk. And if there is no one to talk to one imagines someone, as though one were writing a letter to somebody who loves one, and who will want to know, with the sweet eagerness and solicitude of love, what one does and what the place one is in looks like. It makes one feel less lonely to think like this,—to write it down, as if to one's friend who cares. For I'm afraid of loneliness; shiveringly, terribly afraid. I don't mean the ordinary physical loneliness, for here I am, deliberately travelled away from London to get to it, to its spaciousness and healing. I mean that awful loneliness of spirit that is the ultimate tragedy of life. When you've got to that, really reached it, without hope, without escape, you die. You just can't bear it, and you die.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, In the Mountains

“The only thing to do with one's old sorrows is to tuck them up neatly in their shroud and turn one's face away from their grave towards what is coming next.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, In the Mountains

“I don't want to stay here without you,' said Dolly. 'This place is you. You've made it. It is soaked in you. I should feel haunted here without you. Why, I should feel lost.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, In the Mountains

“You've no idea,' Dolly answered irrelevantly, her eyes wide with wonder at her past self, 'how difficult it is not to marry Germans once you've begun.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, In the Mountains

“It's very awkward when you aren't so old inside as you are outside.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, In the Mountains

“Why don't they read him more? I have him in eight volumes; none of your little books of selections, which somehow take away all his true flavour, but every bit of him from beginning to end. Nobody ever made so many couplets that fit in to so many occasions of one's life. I believe I could describe my daily life with Mrs. Barnes and Dolly entirely in couplets from Crabbe. It is the odd fate of his writings to have turned by the action of time from serious to droll. He decomposes, as it were, hilariously. I lay for hours this afternoon enjoying his neat couplets. He enchants me. I forget time when I am with him. It was Crabbe who made me late for supper. But he is the last person one takes out for a walk with one if one isn't happy. Crabbe is a barometer of serenity. You have to be in a cloudless mood to enjoy him. I was in that mood to-day. I had escaped.”
― Mary Annette Von Arnim, In the Mountains