Vera Quotes

“He had the effect on her of a window being thrown open and fresh air and sunlight being let in”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Vera

“Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities.”
― Oscar Wilde, Vera Or The Nihilists

“I would sooner lose my best friend than my worst enemy. To have friends, you know, one need only be good-natured; but when a man has no enemy left there must be something mean about him.”
― Oscar Wilde, Vera Or The Nihilists

“One went on and on, never dreaming of the sudden dreadful day when the coverings were going to be dropped and one would see it was death after all, that it had been death all the time, death pretending, death waiting”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Vera

“A house,' said Wemyss, explaining its name to Lucy on the morning of their arrival, 'should always be named after whatever most insistently catches the eye.'

'Then oughtn't it to have been called The Cows?' asked Lucy; for the meadows round were strewn thickly as far as she could see with recumbent cows, and they caught her eye much more than the tossing bare willow branches.

'No,' said Wemyss, annoyed. 'It ought not to have been called The Cows.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Vera

“For romantic young people like he is, the world always looks best at a distance; and a prison where one's allowed to order one's own dinner is not at all bad.”
― Oscar Wilde, Vera Or The Nihilists

“For myself, the only immortality I desire is to invent a new sauce.”
― Oscar Wilde, Vera Or The Nihilists

“Life is much too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.”
― Oscar Wilde, Vera Or The Nihilists

“Too often she had seen the first indignation of disappointed parents at the marriage of the their children harden into a matter of pride, a matter of doggedness and principle, and finally become ridiculous. If the marriages turned out happy, how absurd to persist in an antiquated disapproval; if they turned out wretched, then how urgent the special need for love.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Vera

“Strange how tightly one's body could be held, how close to somebody else's heart, and yet one wasn't anywhere near the holder. They locked you up in prisons that way, holding your body tight and thinking they had got you, and all the while your mind—you—was as free as the wind and the sunlight. She couldn't help it, she struggled hard to feel as she had felt when she woke up and saw him sitting near her; but the way he had refused to be friends, the complete absence of any readiness in him to meet her, not half, nor even a quarter, but a little bit of the way, had for the first time made her consciously afraid of him. She”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Vera

“In these modern days to be vulgar, illiterate, common and vicious, seems to give a man a marvellous infinity of rights that his honest fathers never dreamed of.”
― Oscar Wilde, Vera or the Nihilists

“To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomatist—the problem is so entirely the same in both cases. To know exactly how much oil one must put with one's vinegar.”
― Oscar Wilde, Vera Or The Nihilists

“For an instant she had an impulse to cry out and beat on the door, not to care who heard, not to care that the whole house should come and gather round her naked misery; but she was stopped by a sudden new wisdom. It shuddered down on her heart, a wisdom she had never known or needed before, and held her quiet. At all costs there mustn’t be two of them doing these things, at all costs these things mustn’t be doubled, must have echoes. If Everard was like this he must be like it alone. (160-1)”
― Elizabeth Von Arnim, Vera