Elizabeth von Arnim's Collected Works Quotes

“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!”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth von Arnim's Collected Works: The Enchanted April, The Solitary Summer, The Benefactress, Vera, and More

“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, Elizabeth von Arnim's Collected Works: The Enchanted April, The Solitary Summer, The Benefactress, Vera, and More

“How is it that you should feel so vastly superior whenever you do not happen to enter into or understand your neighbour's thoughts when, as a matter of fact, your not being able to do so is less a sign of folly in your neighbour than of incompleteness in yourself?”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth von Arnim's Collected Works: The Enchanted April, The Solitary Summer, The Benefactress, Vera, and More

“It's very awkward when you aren't so old inside as you are outside. For years I've been trying to be dignified, and I'm always being tripped up by a kind of apparently incurable natural effervescence.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth von Arnim's Collected Works: The Enchanted April, The Solitary Summer, The Benefactress, Vera, and More

“Oh, delight, delight to think one didn't die this time, that one isn't going to die this time after all, but is going to get better, going to live, going presently to be quite well again and able to go back to one's friends, to the people who still love one....”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth von Arnim's Collected Works: The Enchanted April, The Solitary Summer, The Benefactress, Vera, and More

“When I drive to the lupins and see them all spread out as far as eye can reach in perfect beauty of colour and scent and bathed in the mild August sunshine, I feel I must send for somebody to come and look at them with me, and talk about them to me, and share in the pleasure; and when I run over the list of my friends and try to find one who would enjoy them, I am frightened once more at the solitariness in which we each of us live.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth von Arnim's Collected Works: The Enchanted April, The Solitary Summer, The Benefactress, Vera, and More

“spirits”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth von Arnim's Collected Works: The Enchanted April, The Solitary Summer, The Benefactress, Vera, and More