Elizabeth and Her German Garden quotes

They say the same thing over and over again so emphatically that I think it must be something nasty about me; but

I shall not let myself be frightened away by the sarcasm of owls.

This is less a garden than a wilderness.

… round about are persuaded that I am, to put it as kindly as possible, exceedingly eccentric, for the news has travelled that I spend the day out of doors with a book, and that no mortal eye has ever yet seen me sew or cook.

But why cook when you can get someone to cook for you?

And as for sewing, the maids will hem the sheets better and quicker than I could, and all forms of needlework of the fancy order are inventions of the evil one for keeping the foolish from applying their heart to wisdom.

I trotted diligently up and down the passages; I criticised and suggested and commanded more in one day than I had done in all the rest of the time; I wrote regularly and sent my love; but I could not manage to fret and yearn.

What are you to do if your conscience is clear and your liver in order and the sun is shining?

“And not let you waste your best years buried.”

“But I like being buried.”

“Such solitude is not right.”

“I enjoyed the winter immensely,” I persisted when they were a little quieter; “I sleighed and skated, and then there were the children, and shelves and shelves full of—” I was going to say books, but stopped.

Reading is an occupation for men; for women it is reprehensible waste of time.

And how could I talk to them of the happiness I felt when the sun shone on the snow, or of the deep delight of hoarfrost days?

When she begins, I go and lean out of the window and look at my little friends out there in the borders while listening to her music, and feel full of pleasant sadness and regret.

It is so sweet to be sad when one has nothing to be sad about.

The April baby came panting up just as I had written that, the others hurrying along behind, and with flaming cheeks displayed for my admiration three brand-new kittens, lean and blind, that she was carrying in her pinafore, and that had just been found motherless …

The April baby recovered her speech first, and lifting her finger, pointed it at the criminal in just indignation.

“Such a child will never go into the Himmel,”

she said with great emphasis, and the air of one who delivers judgment.

Who can begin conventional amiability the first thing in the morning? It is the hour of savage instincts and natural tendencies; it is the triumph of the Disagreeable and the Cross.

I am convinced that the Muses and the Graces never thought of having breakfast anywhere but in bed.

and it has actually happened once or twice when great friends have been staying with me that I have wished, when they left, I might not see them again for at least ten years.

I suppose the fact is, that no friendship can stand the breakfast test, and here, in the country, we invariably think it our duty to appear at breakfast.

Civilisation has done away with curl-papers, yet at that hour the soul of the Hausfrau is as tightly screwed up in them as was ever her grandmother’s hair;

… life, for almost immediately afterwards, as it now seems to me, he died before he need have done because he would eat crab, a dish that never agreed with him, in the face of his doctor’s warning that if he did he would surely die.

“What! am I to be conquered by crabs?”

he demanded indignantly of the doctor; for apart from loving them with all his heart he had never yet been conquered by anything. “Nay, sir, the combat is too unequal—do not, I pray you, try it again,” replied the doctor.

but the behaviour of my legs became so alarming that after vainly casting imploring glances at him and seeing that he continued his singing unmoved, I put out my hand and pulled his sleeve.

“Hal-le-lu-jah,” sang my father with deliberation;

continuing in a low voice without changing the expression of his face, his lips hardly moving, and his eyes fixed abstractedly on the ceiling till the organist, who was also the postman, should have finished his solo, “Did I not tell thee to sit still, …

Give me a garden full of strong, healthy creatures, able to stand roughness and cold without dismally giving in and dying.

I never could see that delicacy of constitution is pretty, either in plants or women.

No doubt there are many lovely flowers to be had by heat and constant coaxing, but then for each of these there are fifty others still lovelier that will gratefully grow in God’s wholesome air and are blessed in return with a far greater intensity …

My windows are gay with hyacinths and lilies of the valley; and though, as I have said, I don’t admire the smell of hyacinths in the spring when it seems wanting in youth and chastity next to that of other flowers,

I am glad enough now to bury my nose in their heavy sweetness.

In December one cannot afford to be fastidious; besides, one is actually less fastidious about everything in the winter. The keen air braces soul as well as body into robustness, and the food and the perfume disliked in the summer are perfectly welcome then.

What a comfort it is to have such wells of wisdom constantly at my disposal!

Anybody can have a husband, but to few is it given to have a sage, and the combination of both is as rare as it is useful.

Indeed, in its practical utility the only thing I ever saw to equal it is a sofa my neighbour has bought as a Christmas surprise for her husband, and which she showed me the last time I called there—a beautiful invention, as she explained, combining …

as it is, there he is still occupying the best place, wrapped up carefully for the winter, excluding kinder roses, and probably intending to repeat the same conduct next year.

Well, trials are the portion of mankind, and gardeners have their share, and in any case it is better to be tried by plants than persons

, seeing that with plants you know that it is you who are in the wrong, and with persons it is always the other way about—and who is there among us who has not felt the pangs of injured innocence, and known them to be …

The April baby, who has had a nursery governess of an altogether alarmingly zealous type attached to her person for the last six weeks, looked up from her bread and milk.

“It sounds like islands,” she remarked pensively.

“Majora, Minora, Alderney, and Sark,” explained her pupil.

The Man of Wrath says it is because they are not married. Without venturing to differ entirely from the opinion of experience, I would add that the strain of continually having to set an example must surely be very great.

It is much easier, and often more pleasant, to be a warning than an example

, and governesses are but women, and women are sometimes foolish, and when you want to be foolish it must be annoying to have to be wise.

her convictions have the sad gray colouring of the dingy streets and houses she lives amongst—the sad colour of humanity in masses.

Submission to what people call their “lot” is simply ignoble.

If your lot makes you cry and be wretched, get rid of it and take another; strike out for yourself; don’t listen to the shrieks of your relations, to their gibes or their entreaties; don’t let your own microscopic set prescribe your goings-out and comings-in;

but it is silly. Why cry over things that are done? Why do naughty things at all, if you are going to repent afterward?

Nobody is naughty unless they like being naughty; and nobody ever really repents unless they are afraid they are going to be found out.

”

“

Truth is always rude, my dear,

” he replied complacently.

a single turnip on his own place is more admirable in his eyes than the tallest, pinkest, straightest pine that ever reared its snow-crowned head against the setting sunlight.

Now observe the superiority of woman, who sees that both are good, and after having gazed at the pine and been made happy by its beauty, goes home and placidly eats the turnip.

He went once and only once to this particular place, and made us feel so small by his blasé behaviour that I never invite him now. It is a beautiful spot, endless forest stretching along the shore as far as the eye can reach;

at our feet a narrow strip of pale yellow sand; right and left the line of sparkling forest; and we ourselves standing in a world of white and diamond traceries.

The stillness of an eternal Sunday lay on the place like a benediction.

Minora broke the silence by remarking that Dresden was pretty, but she thought this beat it almost.

The paper is dark chocolate colour, almost black; that is in order that after years of use the dirt may not show, and the room need not be done up.

Dirt is like wickedness, you see, Miss Minora⁠—its being there never matters; it is only when it shows so much as to be apparent to everybody that we are ashamed of it.

At intervals round the high walls are chairs, and cabinets with lamps on them, and in one corner is a great white cold stove—or is it majolica?” she asked, turning to me.

… sun, but they are as carefully covered with brown lace curtains under heavy stuff ones as though a whole row of houses were just opposite, with peering eyes at every window trying to look in, instead of there only being fields, and trees, and birds.

No fire, no sunlight, no books, no flowers; but a consoling smell of red cabbage coming up under the door, mixed, in due season, with soapsuds.

”

“Ah, when did I go there indeed? When did I not go there? I have been calling there all my life.”

Minora’s eyes rolled doubtfully first at me then at Irais from the depths of her head-wrappings; they are large eyes with long dark eyelashes, and far be it from me to deny that each eye taken by itself is fine, but they are put in all wrong.

“The only thing you would learn there,” went on Irais, “would be the significance of sofa corners in Germany.