ADA LEVERSON QUOTES
British writer (1862-1933)
Looking at the poems of John Gray when I saw the tiniest rivulet of text meandering through the very largest meadow of margin, I suggested to Oscar Wilde that he should go a step further than these minor poets; he should publish a book all margin; full of beautiful, unwritten thoughts.
ADA LEVERSON
Letters to the Sphinx from Oscar Wilde
Suspense is torture ... but delightful--or there'd be no gambling in the world.
ADA LEVERSON
The Twelfth Hour
You see it's a peculiar case. It won't be like an ordinary marriage, a young couple and so on, nor a mariage de convenance, either, in the ordinary sense. Here are two lonely people intending to live solitary lives. Suddenly, you -- most kindly, I must say -- introduce us. I, with my great experience and my instinctive flair, see immediately that this is the right woman in the right place. I bother her until she consents -- and there you are.
ADA LEVERSON
Love's Shadow
Most people now seem to treasure anything they value in proportion to the extent that it's followed about and surrounded by the vulgar public.
ADA LEVERSON
Tenterhooks
You don't know a woman until you have had a letter from her.
ADA LEVERSON
Tenterhooks
Many women I know think the ideal of happiness is to be in love with a great man, or to be the wife of a great public success; to share his triumph! They forget you share the man as well!
ADA LEVERSON
Tenterhooks
Some men are born husbands; they have a passion for domesticity, for a fireside, for a home. Yet, curiously, these men very rarely stay at home. Apparently what they want is to have a place to get away from.
ADA LEVERSON
Love at Second Sight
Like all weddings it had left the strange feeling of futility, the slight sense of depression that comes to English people who have tried, from their strong sense of tradition, to be festive and sentimental and in high spirits too early in the day. The frame of mind supposed to be appropriate to an afternoon wedding can only be genuinely experienced by an Englishman at two o'clock in the morning.
ADA LEVERSON
Love's Shadow
The marvellous instinct with which women are usually credited seems too often to desert them on the only occasions when it would be of any real use. One would say it was there for trivialities only, since in a crisis they are usually dense, fatally doing the wrong thing. It is hardly too much to say that most domestic tragedies are caused by the feminine intuition of men and the want of it in women.
ADA LEVERSON
The Little Ottleys
A morbid propensity that causes great suffering in domestic life is often curiously infectious to the very person for whom it creates most suffering.
ADA LEVERSON
Bird of Paradise
She suspected him of infidelity, with and without reason, morning, noon and night.
ADA LEVERSON
Bird of Paradise
Chaos, illumined by flashes of lightning.
ADA LEVERSON
on Robert Browning's style, Letters to the Sphinx
As a rule the person found out in a betrayal of love holds, all the same, the superior position of the two. It is the betrayed one who is humiliated.
ADA LEVERSON
Love's Shadow
When a passion is not realized ... it fades away, or becomes ideal worship--Dante--Petrarch--that sort of thing!
ADA LEVERSON
Tenterhooks
Women are so perverse. Look how they won't wear black when nothing suits them so well!
ADA LEVERSON
The Twelfth Hour
When I see a cheerful young man shrieking about how full of life he is, banging on a drum, and blowing on a tin trumpet, and speaking of his good spirits, it depresses me, since naturally it gives the contrary impression. It can't be real. It ought to be but it isn't. If the noisy person meant what he said, he wouldn't say it.
ADA LEVERSON
Love at Second Sight
The Futurists?.... Well, of course, they are already past.
ADA LEVERSON
Love at Second Sight
She thought that most women make a great mistake in allowing dress to be the master instead of the servant of their good looks; many women were, she considered, entirely crushed and made insignificant by the beauty of their clothes.
ADA LEVERSON
Tenterhooks
It is all very well to say that children are happier with mud pies and rag dolls than with these elaborate delights. There may be something in this theory, but when their amusements are carried to such a point of luxurious and imaginative perfection it certainly gives them great and even unlimited enjoyment at the time.
ADA LEVERSON
Bird of Paradise
To a woman--I mean, a nice woman--there is no such thing as men. There is a man; and either she is so fond of him that she can talk of nothing else, however unfavourably, or so much in love with him that she never mentions his name.
ADA LEVERSON
Love at Second Sight