Elizabeth Von Arnim
I have always suspected that people would be better if they were more often put among flowers. Not improved loudly, you understand. Not lectured into virtue, nor organized into goodness, nor corrected by persons who are quite sure they know what is best for everyone else. I mean simply placed for a little while in sunlight, given air, allowed quiet, and left near enough to roses to remember that life was not meant to consist entirely of duties, meals, bills, visits, and being sensible. I have written often of women who are tired without being allowed to say so. Women who are married, or respectable, or useful, or praised for qualities that have nearly extinguished them. I have liked to let them escape — sometimes only into a garden, sometimes into solitude, sometimes into love, and sometimes into the far more dangerous freedom of discovering that they have a self. Do not think, because I write lightly, that I do not mean it seriously. Lightness is one of the best ways of telling the truth without making everyone run away. A joke may open a window where a sermon would only close the curtains. If you read me now, I hope you will not come only for pretty places, though I am fond of pretty places and see no reason to apologize for them. Come also for the small rebellions: the woman who says no, the heart that revives unexpectedly, the person who discovers that happiness is not a crime, and the garden that quietly defeats despair. And if, after reading, you feel an unreasonable desire to go somewhere warm, forgive someone, abandon a tiresome habit, plant something, or live a little more honestly — then perhaps we shall have understood each other perfectly.