Niels Lyhne quotes

though in more genial warmth, under a more powerful sun, it might have shot up, straight and tall, with a gloriously rich and brilliant bloom. Such was the image of her real self that she carried in her mind.

She dreamed a thousand dreams of those sunlit regions and was consumed with longing for this other and richer self, forgetting⁠—what is so easily forgotten⁠—that even the fairest dreams and the deepest longings do not add an inch to the stature of the human soul.

One fine day a suitor came to her.

then the thread is severed; then all that it held falls and is shattered; then the shriek of despair sounds through the emptiness.

In doubt, no one despairs.

On a sunny afternoon in September, Edele was sitting on the landing of the half-dozen broad, old-fashioned steps that led down from the summer parlor into the garden.

Not an idea could he find in his brain; not a word would be born on his tongue, and he looked straight ahead with a stupid expression of arrested profundity.

“It is a hat, Mr. Bigum,” said Edele carelessly, to break the embarrassed silence.

“Yes,” said the tutor eagerly, delighted to hear her confirm a likeness that had struck him also; but the next moment he blushed at his clumsy answer.

they close their eyes to the realities and stop their ears when life cries ‘No’ to their wishes. They want to forget the deep chasm fate has placed between them and the object of their ardent longing. They want their dream to be fulfilled.

But life takes no account of dreams. There isn’t a single obstacle that can be dreamed out of the world, and in the end we lie there crying at the edge of the chasm, which hasn’t changed and is just where it always was.

But we have changed, for we have let our dreams goad all our thoughts and spur all our longings to the very highest tension.

His unkind mockery really sprang from jealousy, for he had fallen in love with Erik on the very first day, while the latter, in shy aloofness, half reluctant, half supercilious, just barely and grudgingly allowed himself to be loved.

Among all the emotional relations of life is there any that is finer, more sensitive, and more fervent than the exquisitely modest love of one boy for another boy?

It is a love that never speaks and never dares to vent itself in a caress or a look, a seeing love that grieves bitterly over every fault in the loved one, a love made up of longing and admiration and self-forgetfulness, of pride and …

For a while they missed him sorely and bitterly, for their life had been gradually formed on the supposition that they were three to share it.

Three were company, variety, change; two were boredom and nothing at all.

What in the world could two find to do?

How he envied the audacity that rushes confidently into words, never heeding that words bring actions, and actions bring consequences—until those consequences are at its heels. People who possessed it always seemed to him like centaurs—man and horse cast in a single mould.

With them impulse and leap were one, whereas he was divided into rider and horse⁠—impulse one thing, leap something very different.

Whenever he pictured himself declaring his love for Mrs. Boye—and he always had to picture everything—he could plainly see himself in the scene, his attitude, his every motion, his whole figure from the front, from the side, and from the back.

People may differ, but in their dreams they do not differ; there they always attain the three or four things that they desire—it may be with more or less speed and completeness, but they always attain them in the end.

No one seriously dreams of himself as empty-handed.

Therefore no one ever discovers himself in his dreams or becomes conscious through them of his individuality.

Happy in his sorrow is he who at the death of one dear to him can weep all his tears over the emptiness, the desolation, and the loneliness.

Sorer and bitterer are the tears with which you try to atone for the past when you have failed in love toward one who is gone and to whom you can never make amends for what you have sinned.

For now they come back to you:

… allow himself to be so absorbed in the place where he happened to be that he forgot what was far away, or if he did not forget it, at least pushed it into the distant background, where it was buried by the present—as under mountains.

No one would think he had imagination.

At last! Mrs. Boye herself opened the door to the anteroom before he had time to ring. She said nothing, but gave him her hand in a long, sympathetic clasp; the newspapers had announced his bereavement.

Her dizziness seemed blown away, leaving only a rather pleasant sense of weakness in her knees. She walked about to feel it better. Secretly, as if by accident, she gave the rocking-chair a confidential little push with her elbow.

She rather liked scenes.

With one look she said farewell to some invisible thing. Then she rolled up the blinds, and it seemed like another room.

it was you planting your foot on your own.

In this wise your personality grows with your knowledge and is clarified and unified through it. To learn is as beautiful as to live.

Do not be afraid to lose yourself in minds greater than your own!

it is a branch grown in the dark, which is distinctive only so long as it retains its sickly pallor. And it is by the sound growth in yourself that you must live.

Only the sound can grow great.

Christmas Eve came upon Niels Lyhne unawares. For the past six months, he had not visited anyone except now and then the Neergaards.

it seemed that a hidden woman’s hand must be sheltering them, keeping them from harm, supporting and guiding them.

So it came to pass that evil was turned into good, and a sinner and a saint each made the other better.

The Claudis had two children, a son who was in a merchant’s office in Hamburg and a nineteen-year-old daughter named Fennimore after the heroine in St. Roche, one of Frau von Paalzow’s novels which had been very popular in the time of Mrs. Claudi’s girlhood.

and there they sit, radiant but distant, smiling but weary, in divine quiescence, while the incense of a slothful adoration rises, puff on puff, in festive convolutions.

Niels Lyhne was tired. These repeated runnings to a leap that was never leaped had wearied him.

Everything seemed to him hollow and worthless, distorted and confused, and, oh, so petty!

Erik in honor and glory, and he himself one of the many, many commonplace folk and nothing else; poor, at last, by necessity, not by choice; a real beggar, not a prince in disguise. … And it was sweet to dream himself so bitterly humble.

But dreams are dreams, and he laughed at himself, as he thought that people who neglect their own work always have no end of time to interest themselves in that of others.

It also occurred to him that, when he came face to face with Erik, the latter would, of course, disclaim his letter and pass it off as a joke.

This was Fennimore’s new home, and for a while it was as bright as happiness could make it, for they were both young and in love, strong and healthy, and without a care for their means of subsistence, either spiritual or material.

But every palace of joy that rises heavenward has sand mixed in the earth on which it is founded, and the sand will collect and run away, slowly perhaps, imperceptibly perhaps, but it runs and runs, grain by grain.

… And love? Even love is not a rock, however much we may wish to believe it.

But every palace of joy that rises heavenward has sand mixed in the earth on which it is founded, and the sand will collect and run away, slowly perhaps, imperceptibly perhaps, but it runs and runs, grain by grain. …

And love? Even love is not a rock, however much we may wish to believe it.

She loved him with her whole soul, with the hot, tremulous passion born of fear. He was to her much more than a god, much nearer—he was an idol, whom she worshipped without reason and without reserve.

She was too alluring in her blind love; her beauty, which had the provocative luxuriance and the humble seductiveness of the female slave, incited him to a passion that knew neither bounds nor mercy.

In the old myth about Amor, is it not told somewhere that he puts his hand over Psyche’s eyes before they fly away, rapturously, into the glowing night?

Poor Fennimore! if she could have been consumed by the fire of her own heart, he who should have guarded her would have fanned the flames;

Poor Fennimore! She did not know that the hymn of joy can be sung so often that both melody and words are lost, and nothing remains but a twaddle of triviality.

She did not know that the intoxication which uplifts today takes its strength from the wings of tomorrow

, and when at length sobriety dawned, gray and heavy, she realized tremblingly that they had loved themselves down to a sweet contempt for themselves and each other—a sweet contempt which day by day lessened in sweetness and became, at last, utterly bitter.

A woman can’t be pure, and isn’t supposed to be—how could she? It is against nature! And do you think God made her to be pure? Answer me!—No, and ten thousand times no. Then why this lunacy!

Why fling us up to the stars with one hand, when you have to pull us down with the other!

Can’t you let us walk the earth by your side, one human being with another, and nothing more at all? It is impossible for us to step firmly on the prose of life when you blind us with your poetic will-o’-the-wisps. Let us alone!

There is nothing to tell.

It was a day like all other days, when they were alone together in the sitting-room, as they had been a hundred times before

; their conversation was about things of no moment, and that which happened was outwardly as common and as everyday-like as possible. It was nothing except that Niels stood looking out of the window, and Fennimore came over to him and looked out too.

It was a day like all other days, when they were alone together in the sitting-room, as they had been a hundred times before; their conversation was about things of no moment, and that which happened was outwardly as common and as everyday-like as possible.

It was nothing except that Niels stood looking out of the window, and Fennimore came over to him and looked out too.

That was all, but it was enough, for in a flash like lightning, the past and present and future were transformed for Niels Lyhne by the consciousness that he loved the woman standing by his side, not as anything bright and sweet and happy and …

He did not quite mean this, if the truth were told.

Man often builds for himself theories in which he refuses to dwell.

Thoughts often run faster than the sense of right and wrong is willing to follow. Yet the conception was really present in his mind, and it took away some of the cankerous venom inherent in the craftiness, falseness, and duplicity of their lives.

So it sank and went on sinking, that lofty castle of their love, from the pinnacles of which they had gazed so proudly out over the world, and within which they had felt so strong and noble.

Still they were happy among the ruins.

When they walked in the woods now, it was usually on gloomy days, when the fog hung under the dark branches and thickened between the wet trunks, so that none should see how they kissed and embraced, both here and there, and none should hear …

It brought no change when Erik, after a while, grew tired of his idea and again began his carousing so eagerly that he was rarely at home for forty-eight hours at a stretch.

Where they had fallen, there they lay.

Once in a great while, perhaps, in lonely hours, they gazed regretfully toward the heights from which they had fallen, or perhaps they only wondered, and thought what a strain it must have been to stay on that level, and felt themselves more snugly housed …

She wrenched her arm away with such force that he staggered and almost lost his uncertain foothold.

“Can’t you hear that I hate you!” she screamed shrilly.

“And isn’t there so much of a decent man’s brain left in you that you can understand it!

But Niels Lyhne had no star. He did not know what to do with himself and his gifts.

It was all very well to have talent if he could only have used it, but he went about like a painter without hands.

How he envied the people, great and small, who always, whenever they reached out into life, found a handle to lay hold of; for he could never find any handle.

for he could never find any handle. It seemed as though he could do nothing but sing over again the old romantic songs, and in truth he had so far done nothing else.

His talent was like something apart in him, a quiet Pompeii, or a harp that had to be taken out of its corner.

It was not all-pervading, did not run down the street with him or tingle in his fingertips—not in the least. His talent had no grip on him.

He yearned to feel something closing around him like a home and holding him fast, no matter how. He could not bear the indifference of life any longer, could not endure being cast off and thrown back on himself again and again.

No home on earth, no God in heaven, no goal out there in the future!

He would at least have a home. He would make it his own by loving everything there, big and little, every rock, every tree, the animate and the inanimate;

… that when he went away tired the strength that he had used up lay behind him in his work, and the work would stand and not be eaten up by doubt in the night or dispersed by the breath of criticism on the morning after.

There were no Sisyphus stones in agriculture.

What a joy it was, too, when he had worked till he was tired, to go to bed and gather strength in sleep and to spend it again, as regularly as day and night follow one upon the other, never hindered by the caprices of …

he was content to follow it. Once in a while, he would take out some of his old attempts, and then he would always wonder if it was really he who had written these pretty, artistic things.

His own verses invariably brought tears to his eyes, but he would not for anything in the world have changed places with the poor fellow who wrote them.

Suddenly, in the spring, Gerda fell ill and could not recover.