fancy miss nancy [quotations]

[thebriarfieldchronicles]

Edmund Dulac’s illustrations of Villette by Charlotte Bronte (1922 edition)

[thebriarfieldchronicles]

Edmund Dulac’s illustrations of Villette by Charlotte Bronte (1922 edition)

[fancymissnancy1-blog]

OMG. Visual interpretation of Villette? Yes PLEASE

[theredshoes]

Manuscript page from Villette

[fancymissnancy1-blog]

Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the thoughts he believes other men have about him, until that fabric of opinion is threatened with ruin?

George Eliot, Middlemarch

[fancymissnancy1-blog]

since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you; wholly to be a fool while spring is in the world my blood approves and kisses are a better fate than wisdom lady i swear by all flowers. don't cry --the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids flutter which says we are for each other. then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life's not a paragraph and death i think is no parenthesis.

e.e. cummings, “since feeling is first”

[fancymissnancy1-blog]

Who has not felt the beauty of a woman's arm? The unspeakable suggestions of tenderness  that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness.

George Eliot

[fancymissnancy1-blog]

A human being is an immense abyss, but you, Lord, keep count even of his hairs, and not one of them is lost in you, yet even his hairs are easier to number than the affections and movements of his heart.

Augustine, The Confessions

[fancymissnancy1-blog]

Alas, and yet what are you, my written and painted thoughts! It is not long ago that you were still so many-colored, young and malicious, so full of hidden spices you made me sneeze and laugh--and now?  You have already taken off some of your novelty and some of you, I fear, are on the point of becoming truths: they already look so immortal, so pathetically righteous, so boring!  And has it ever been otherwise? For what things do we write and paint, we mandarins with Chinese brushes, we immortalizers of things which let themselves be written, what alone are we capable of painting?  Alas, only that which is about to wither and is beginning to lose its fragrance! Alas, only storms departing exhausted and feelings grown old and yellow! Alas, only birds strayed and grown weary in flight who now let themselves be caught in the hand--in our hand! We immortalize that which cannot live and fly much longer, weary and mellow things alone! And it is only your afternoon, my written and painted thoughts, for which I alone have the colors, many colors perhaps, many many-colored tendernesses and fifty yellows and green and reds:--but no one will divine from how you looked in your morning--you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude--you my old beloved--wicked thoughts!

Nietzsche

[fancymissnancy1-blog]

Usually it does not happen, and in every corner of the earth there are people waiting who hardly know to what extent they are waiting but even less that they are waiting in vain.  Sometimes the awakening call, that chance event which gives 'permission' to act, comes but too late--when the best part of youth and strength to act has already been used up in sitting still, and how many a man has discovered to his horror when he rose up that his limbs had gone to sleep and that his spirit was already too heavy! 'It is too late'--he has said to himself and henceforth forever useless. Could it be that, in the realm of genius, 'Raphael without hands' is, taking the phrase in its widest sense, not the exception, but the rule? Perhaps genius is not so very rare: perhaps what is rare is the five hundred hands needed to tyrannize over the kairos, the right time---to take chance by the forelock!

Nietzsche

[fancymissnancy1-blog]

The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty. Above all one's own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for it.

Pliny the Elder

[fancymissnancy1-blog]

When a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her.

Jane Austen

[fancymissnancy1-blog]

Perhaps it is difficult to see the value of having one's self back in that kind of mood but I do see it. I think we are advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We all too soon forget the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were... It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what a notebook is all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open ourselves. Your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.

Joan Didion

[fancymissnancy1-blog]

We are all worms. But I believe I am a glow worm.

Winstone Churchill

[fancymissnancy1-blog]

There is not a person in the world that behaves as badly as preying mantises. But wait, you say, there is no right or wrong in nature; right and wrong is a human concept! Precisely! We are moral creatures in an amoral world...Or, consider the alternative...it is only human feeling that is freakishly amiss...All right, then. It is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world  is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave...lobotomized, go back to the creek, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first.

Annie Dillard

[fancymissnancy1-blog]

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

[fancymissnancy1-blog]

Hear no evil, speak no evil, and you will never be invited to a party.

Oscar Wilde

[fancymissnancy1-blog]

And now, Harry, let us step out into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter