Alice Meynell Quotes

It is for fear of the grown-up, or at least out of respect towards them, that a chapter must be given to fairies. If the children do not care very much for fairies, they must be made to care. "Who is to care if they do not? Who is to be properly childlike if they are not?"

But in the eternities,
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

With this ambiguous earth
His dealings have been told us. These abide:
The signal to a maid, the human birth,
The lesson, and the young Man crucified.

Thou inmost, ultimate
Council of judgment, palace of decrees
Where the high senses hold their spiritual state, Sued by earth's embassies,
And sign, approve, accept, conceive, create.

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

[W]hat is now and then attempted is perhaps "for art's sake." He that saveth his art shall lose it.

The mothers of all ages are those who have suffered because others suffered; for each of them, self is less sensitive than the sense of her child. Self is not locked up in the maternal heart, there to be cherished, as it is by the egoist, or to be crushed and silenced, as it is by the Saint. In the mother, self is not lost, but loses all its evil by the passionate personal love that distributes it among sons and daughters. Perfect self-less love would perhaps be distributed through the multitude, but a mother is not perfect: nature has so much use for her—separate, family use—that she cannot let her go free from irrational, indispensable partialities and limitings, even injustices, all serving the turn of the race.

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."

The smoke of a cigarette, more sensitive in motion than breath or blood, has its waves so multitudinously inflected and reinflected, with such flights and such delays, it flows and bends upon currents of so subtle influence and impulse as to include the most active, impetuous, and lingering curls ever drawn by the finest Oriental hand—and that is not a Hindu hand, nor any hand of Aryan race. The Japanese has captured the curve of the section of a sea-wave—its flow, relaxation, and fall; but this is a single moment, whereas the line of cigarette-smoke in a still room fluctuates in twenty delicate directions.

A wall is the safeguard of simplicity.

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

[I]t would be a pity if laughter should ever become, like rhetoric and the arts, a habit.

[A]n English wit has well said that affectation displeases us because it has not too much, but too little, art.

It is not extravagance, it is not excitement, it is not excess, or dizziness, or delirium, that chastises habitual pleasure in art, but only dullness.[…] One of the Latin races, having the dullness and keeping wit enough to name it, has the word for it—banalité.

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