Alice Meynell Quotes

London visibly works at nothing but transformation.

The roads […] fly from the city of confusion.[…] No other road looks so resolute in flight as the rail.

For you knew not it was I,
And I knew not it was you.
We have learnt, as days went by.
But a flower struck root and grew
Underground, and no one knew.

[T]he sense of humour has other things to do than to make itself conspicuous in the act of laughter.

Now, in our opinion, no author should be blamed for obscurity; nor should any pains be grudged in the effort to understand him, provided that he has done his best to be intelligible. Difficult thoughts are quite distinct from difficult words. Difficulty of thought is the very heart of poetry.

The travelling heart went free
With endless streams; that strife was stopped;
And down a thousand vales I dropped, I flowed to Italy.

Children appeal to us by a variant of the quality of pathos.

Solitude is separate experience.

[F]or man, woman, and child the tender, irregular, sensitive, living foot, which does not even stand with all its little surface on the ground, and which makes no base to satisfy an architectural eye, is, as it were, the unexpected thing.[…] How weak it is may be seen from a footprint: for nothing makes a more helpless and unsymmetrical sign than does a naked foot.

[R]ight language enlarges the soul as no other power or influence may do.

I wish it were not customary to write of one art in the terms of another, and I use the words "music" and "musical" under protest, because the world has been so delighted to call any verse pleasant to the ear "musical," that it has not supplied us with another and more specialised and appropriate word.

To mount a hill is to lift with you something lighter and brighter than yourself or than any meaner burden. You lift the world, you raise the horizon; you give a signal for the distance to stand up.

The true colour of life is the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest colour of the unpublished blood.

There is nothing in the world more peaceful than apple-leaves with an early moon.

The worst of all reasons for continuing anything is that it is easily continuable.