Clergyman's

Over 500k "Quotes"

“…listening with absorbed attention more to her voice than to what she was saying, and thinking how like she was, flowering through her voice into beauty in the darkness, to some butterflies he had come across in the Swiss mountains the summer before. When they were folded up they were grey, mothlike creatures that one might easily overlook, but directly they opened their wings they became the loveliest things in the world, all rose-colour or heavenly blue. So had she been to him in the daylight that afternoon,–an ordinary woman, not in any way noticeable; but now listen to her, opening into beauty on the wings of her voice!”
— Elizabeth von Arnim

“In the summer,on fine evenings, I love to drive late andalone in the scented forests, and when I havereached a dark part stop, and sit quite still, listeningto the nightingales repeating their little tune overand over aga^n after interludes of gurgling, or ifthere are no nightingales, listening to the marvelloussilence, and letting its blessedness descend intomy very souL The nightingales in the forestsabout here all sing the same tune, and in the samekey of (E flat).”
— Elizabeth von Arnim

“No one ever said aloud any of the kinds of things he was so constantly thinking, because no one in the parish, not Alice, not Lady Higgs, not anybody, ever seemed to see the things he saw. If they thought as he did, if they saw what he did, they never mentioned it; and to have things which are precious to one eternally unmentioned makes one, he had long discovered, lonely. These August nights, for instance–quite remarkably and unusually beautiful, warm and velvety as he had never known them, ushered in each evening by the most astonishing variety of splendid sunsets–nobody had said a single word about them. They might have been February ones, for all the notice they got. Sometimes he climbed up to the top of Burdon Down towards evening, and stood staring in amazement at what looked like heaven let loose in flames over England; but always he stood alone, always there was no one but himself up there, and no one afterwards, when he descended from his heights, seemed to be aware that anything unusual had been going on.”
— Elizabeth von Arnim

“Nobody told me about him [my grandfather], and he died when I was six, and yet within the last year or two, that strange Indian summer of remembrance that comes to us in the leisured times when the children have been born and we have time to think, has made me know him perfectly well. It is rather an uncomfortable thought for the grown-up, and especially for the parent, but of a salutary and restraining nature, that though children may not understand what is said and done before them, and have no interest in it at the time, and though they may forget it at once and for years, yet these things that they have seen and heard and not noticed have after all impressed themselves for ever on their minds, and when they are men and women come crowing back with surprising and often painful distinctness, and away frisk all the cherished little illusions in flocks.”
— Elizabeth von Arnim

“These women accept their beatings with a simplicity worthy of all praise, and far from considering themselves insulted, admire the strength and energy of the man who can administer such eloquent rebukes. In Russia, not only may a man beat his wife, but it is laid down in the catechism and taught all boys at the time of confirmation as necessary at least once a week, whether she has done anything or not, for the sake of her general health and happiness.”I thought I observed a tendency in the Man of Wrath rather to gloat over these castigations.”Pray, my dear man,” I said, pointing with my whip, “look at that baby moon so innocently peeping at us over the edge of the mist just behind that silver birch; and don’t talk so much about women and things you don’t understand. What is the use of your bothering about fists and whips and muscles and all the dreadful things invented for the confusion of obstreperous wives? You know you are a civilised husband, and a civilised husband is a creature who has ceased to be a man.”And a civilised wife?” he asked, bringing his horse close up beside me and putting his arm round my waist, “has she ceased to be a woman?””I should think so indeed,–she is a goddess, and can never be worshipped and adored enough.”
— Elizabeth von Arnim