Alice Meynell Quotes

[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.

If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicity rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the orbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year. Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind.

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

O daisy mine, what will it be to look
From God's side even of such a simple thing?

Flocks of the memories of the day draw near
The dovecote doors of sleep.

There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between a woman and a child, the little breath hurrying beside the longer, as a child's foot runs.

Solitude is separate experience.

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

[S]ome things must needs gain in mystery before we can at all undertake to think upon them. Without mystery they are all obscure. Who can think, for instance, of the infinity of space without adding inconceivable things to his meditation?

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.

Women might be, and were, duly suppressed when, by the mouth of Olympe de Gouges, they claimed a "right to concur in the choice of representatives for the formation of the laws"; but in her person, too, they were liberally allowed to bear political responsibility to the Republic. Olympe de Gouges was guillotined. Robespierre thus made her public and complete amends.

[S]he used her intellect, and that action is the vitality of all poetry that is not song only, but poetry and song.

Life, light, and distance—in poetry—seem to leave on the mind's eye the impression of red, yellow, and blue, radiant less or more according as the life is less or more impassioned, the light celestial, and the space remote.

A sense of art mixes with our modern piety. We are apt to admire the evangelical reticence for its dignity,[…] we are apt to respect the Scripture narratives with their few intense details, their close events and their great omissions alike, for their simplicity, and—it is to be feared that our literature leads us so far—for their "effect."

I make the whole world answer to my art.