Top 120 Elizabeth von Arnim Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Home is the best place when life begins to wobble.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

2. “What a blessing it is to love books.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

3. “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

4. “Beauty made you love, and love made you beautiful.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

5. “The longer I live the greater is my respect for manure in all its forms.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

6. “Well, I for one am unable to imagine how anybody who lives with an intelligent and devoted dog can every be lonely.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

7. “If one believed in angels one would feel that they must love us best when we are asleep and cannot hurt each other; and what a mercy it is that once in every twenty-four hours we are too utterly weary to go on being unkind.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

8. “Laughter – one of the most precious of God’s gifts; the very salt, the very light, the very fresh air of life; the divine disinfectant, the heavenly purge. Could one ever be real friends with somebody one didn’t laugh with? Of course one couldn’t.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

9. “We build the most outrageous castles in the air. Nothing is certain, and everything is possible.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

10. “Love isn’t decent. Love is glorious and shameless.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

11. “And the summer seems as though it would dream on for ever.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

12. “What a blessing it is to love books. Everybody must love something, and I know of no objects of love that give such substantial and unfailing returns as books and a garden.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

13. “Keep quiet and say one’s prayers-certainly not merely the best, but the only things to do if one would be truly happy; but, ashamed of asking when I have received so much, the only form of prayer I would use would be a form of thanksgiving.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

14. “On wet days I will go into the thickest parts of the forest, where the pine needles are everlastingly dry, and when the sun shines I’ll lie on the heath and see how the broom flares against the clouds. I shall be perpetually happy, because there will be no one to worry me.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

15. “I would recommend to those persons who are inclined to stagnate, whose blood is beginning to thicken sluggishly in their veins, to try keeping four dogs, two of which are puppies.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

16. “Upon my word,” thought Mrs. Fisher, “the way one pretty face can turn a delightful man into an idiot is past all patience.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

17. “Life is an admirable arrangement, isn’t it, little mother. It is so clever of it to have June in every year and a morning in every day, let alone things like birds, and Shakespeare, and one’s work.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

18. “Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

19. “She did not like her name. It was a mean, small name, with a kind of facetious twist, she thought, about its end like the upward curve of a pug dog’s tail.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

20. “But there are no men here,” said Mrs. Wilkins, “so how can it be improper? Have you noticed,” she inquired of Mrs. Fisher, who endeavoured to pretend she did not hear, “How difficult it is to be improper without men?”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

21. “I’m so glad I didn’t die on the various occasions I have earnestly wished I might, for I would have missed a lot of lovely weather.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

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

— Elizabeth von Arnim

23. “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

24. “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

25. “I’m sure it’s wrong to go on being good for too long, till one gets miserable. And I can see you’ve been good for years and years, because you look so unhappy.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

26. “Reading was very important; the proper exercise and development of one’s mind was a paramount duty.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

27. “Impossible for anyone to conceive the torments of his nights in bed with his beloved one and estranged from her. That turning of backs, that cold space between their two unhappy bodies.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

28. “I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

29. “Why couldn’t two unhappy people refresh each other on their way through this dusty business of life by a little talk, – real, natural talk, about what they felt, what they would have liked, what they still tried to hope?”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

30. “Does he – does your husband not like music?’ he asked, saying the first thing that came into his head, not really wanting in the least to know what that damned George liked or didn’t like. She hesitated. ‘I – don’t know,’ she said. ‘He – usedn’t to.’ ‘But he doesn’t come here?’ ‘How can he?’ She stopped, and then said softly, ‘The poor darling’s dead.’ His heart gave a bound. A widow. The beastly war had done one good thing, then, – it had removed George.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

31. “That evening was the evening of the full moon. The garden was an enchanted place where all the flowers seemed white. The lilies, the daphnes, the orange-blossom, the white stocks, the white pinks, the white roses – you could see these as plainly as in the daytime; but the coloured flowers existed only as fragrance.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

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

— Elizabeth von Arnim

33. “It is a beautiful spot, endless forest stretching along the shore as far as the eye can reach ; and after driving through it for miles you come suddenly, at the end of an avenue of arching trees, upon the glistening, oily sea, with the orange-coloured sails of distant fishing-smacks shining in the sunlight.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

34. “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.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

35. “Yet he knew that if she wavered he would never forgive her; she would drop at once from her high estate into those depths in his opinion where the dull average of both sexes sprawled for ever in indiscriminate heaps.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

36. “Many are the friendships that have found an unforseeen and sudden end on a journey, and few are those that survive it.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

37. “Who can begin conventional amiability the first thing in the morning?”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

38. “She belongs to the winter that is past, to the darkness that is over, and has no part or lot in the life I shall lead for the next six months. Oh, I could dance and sing for joy that the spring is here! What a ressurection of beauty there is in my garden, and of brightest hope in my heart.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

39. “Guests can be, and often are, delightful, but they should never be allowed to get the upper hand.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

40. “Too often she had seen the first indignation of disappointed parents at the marriage of the their children harden into a matter of pride, a matter of doggedness and principle, and finally become ridiculous. If the marriages turned out happy, how absurd to persist in an antiquated disapproval; if they turned out wretched, then how urgent the special need for love.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

41. “The passion for being for ever with one’s fellows, and the fear of being left for a few hours alone, is to me wholly incomprehensible. I can entertain myself quite well for weeks together, hardly aware, except for the pervading peace, that I have been alone at all.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

42. “She made him think of his mother, of his nurse, of all things kind and comforting, besides having the attraction of not being his mother or his nurse.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

43. “I have always had a liking for pilgrimages, and if I had lived in the Middle Ages would have spent most of my time on the way to Rome. The pilgrims, leaving all their cares at home, the anxieties of their riches or their debts, the wife that worried and the children that disturbed, took only their sins with them, and turning back on their obligations, set out with that sole burden, and perhaps a cheerful heart.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

44. “Christopher loved her with the passion of youth, of imagination, of poetry, of all the fresh beginnings of wonder and worship that have been since love first lit his torch and made in the darkness a great light.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

45. “How glad I am I need not hurry. What a waste of life, just getting and spending.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

46. “Where the trees thicken into a wood, the fragrance of the wet earth and rotting leaves kicked up by the horses’ hoofs fills my soul with delight. I particularly love that smell, – it brings before me the entire benevolence of Nature, for ever working death and decay, so piteous in themselves, into the means of fresh life and glory, and sending up sweet odours as she works.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

47. “To Those Who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine. Small mediaeval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be Let furnished for the month of April. Necessary servants remain. Z, Box 1000, The Times.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

48. “But while admiring my neighbour, I don’t think I shall ever try to follow in her steps, my talents not being of the energetic and organising variety, but rather of that order which makes their owner almost lamentably prone to take up a volume of poetry and wander out to where the kingcups grow, and, sitting on a willow trunk beside a little stream, forget the very existence of everything but green pastures and still waters, and the glad blowing of the wind across the joyous fields.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

49. “True she was old, true she was unbeautiful, true she therefore had no reason to smile, but kind ladies smiled, reason or no. They smiled not because they were happy but because they wished to make happy.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim

50. “This was the simple happiness of complete harmony with her surroundings, the happiness that asks for nothing, that just accepts, just breathes, just is.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim