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Quote by Elizabeth von Arnim

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Delphi Complete Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

The Delphi Complete Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) is a comprehensive compilation of the author's literary output. It features her most renowned works, such as 'Enlightenment,' 'The Enchanted Castle,' and 'The Solitary House,' alongside lesser-known pieces. The collection is enhanced with illustrations that complement the text. more

Author

Elizabeth von Arnim
Elizabeth von Arnim

Elizabeth von Arnim, born on August 31, 1866, and died on February 9, 1941, was a prominent German novelist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Known for her unique female perspective and delicate emotional descriptions, she left a lasting impact on German literature. more

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“I became an ifrit to save the lives of my fellow jinn. What kind of life saver would I be if I let you sit here and wither away in paradise? Just an obstacle. Just an obstacle. I meet the ifrit's eyes. What happened to all your talk about birds and fish having nowhere to live? The ifrit shrugs. I suggest you start holding your breath, my friend, he says, then pushes through the hearing room doors.”

“I talk to my inner lover, and I say, why such rush? We sense that there is some sort of spirit that loves birds and animals and the ants- perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you in your mother's womb. Is it logical you would be walking around entirely orphaned now? The truth is you turned away yourself, and decided to go into the dark alone. Now you are tangled up in others, and have forgotten what you once knew, and that's why everything you do has some weird sense of failure in it.”

“She once complained that her stories were like 'birds bred in cages,' but that concentrated atmosphere, that claustrophobic hothouse of emotion, was her talent. Her stories were little masterpieces of compression: she succinctly contained whole lifetimes in a few pages, every moment loaded with as much as it could bear.”

“And I go out of Father's house and I walk down the street, and it is very quiet even thought it is the middle of the day and I can't hear any noise except birds singing and wind and sometimes buildings falling down in the distance, and if I stand very close to traffic lights I can hear a little click as the colors change.”

“Between the kitchen and the destroyed chapel a door led into an oval-shaped library. The space inside seemed safe except for a large hole at portrait level in the far wall, caused by mortar-shell attack on the villa two months earlier. The rest of the room had adapted itself to this wound, accepting the habits of weather, evening stars, the sound of birds.”

“She's not dead. You didn't kill her, nor did the hunger birds, although they did their best to get to you through her. She's been given her ocean. One day, in its own time, the ocean will give her back.I thought of corpses and of skeletons with pearls for eyes. I thought of mermaids with tails that flicked when they moved, like my goldfishes' tails had flicked before my goldfish had stopped moving, to lie, belly up, like Lettie, on the top of the water. I said, 'Will she be the same?”