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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

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Elizabeth von Arnim
Age: 74 †
Born: 1866
Born: August 31
Died: 1941
Died: February 9
Novelist
Writer
Sydney
NSW
Mary Annette Beauchamp
Alice Cholmondeley
Countess Elizabeth Mary Russell
Elizabeth
Great
Sitting
Impossible
Middle
Books
Reading
Find
Tidy
Book
Ending
Without
Floor

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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.
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Who can begin conventional amiability the first thing in the morning?
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Guests can be, and often are, delightful, but they should never be allowed to get the upper hand.
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Reading was very important the proper exercise and development of one's mind was a paramount duty.
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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.
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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
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I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow.
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What a blessing it is to love books.
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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.
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It is beautiful, beautiful to give one of the very most beautiful things in life.
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Strange that the vanity which accompanies beauty - excusable, perhaps, when there is such great beauty, or at any rate understandable - should persist after the beauty is gone.
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... Why, it would really be being unselfish to go away and be happy for a little, because we would come back so much nicer.
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And the summer seems as though it would dream on for ever.
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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
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Beauty made you love, and love made you beautiful.
Elizabeth von Arnim
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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
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... without it (love), without, anyhow, the capacity for it, people didn't seem to be much good. Dry as old bones, cold as stones, they seemed to become, when love was done inhuman, indifferent, self-absorbed, numb.
Elizabeth von Arnim
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I have been much afflicted again lately by visitors . . . and they gave me to understand that if they had had the arranging of the garden it would have been finished long ago - whereas I don't believe a garden is ever finished. They have all gone now, thank heaven.
Elizabeth von Arnim
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The longer I live the greater is my respect for manure in all its forms.
Elizabeth von Arnim
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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