Ouida
Ouida was the pen name of the English novelist Maria Louise Ramé (although she preferred to be known as Marie Louise de la Ramée).
During her career, she wrote more than 40 novels, children's books and collections of short stories and essays. She was an animal rights activist and animal rescuer, and at times owned as many as thirty dogs. For many years she lived in London, but about 1874 she went to Italy, where she died.
Ouida's work went through several phases during her career. In her early period, her novels were a hybrid of the sensationalism of the 1860s and the proto-adventure novels dubbed "muscular fiction" that were emerging in part as a romanticization of imperial expansion. Later her work was more along the lines of historical romance, though she never stopped comment on contemporary society. She also wrote several stories for children. One of her most famous novels, Under Two Flags, described the British in Algeria in the most extravagant of terms, while nonetheless also expressing sympathy for the Frenchwith whom Ouida deeply identifiedand, to some extent, the Arabs. This book went on to be staged in plays, and subsequently to be turned into at least three movies, transitioning Ouida in the 20th century.
Jack London cites her novel Signa, which describes an unschooled Italian peasant child who achieves fame as an opera composer, and which he read at age eight, as one of the eight reasons for his literary success.
“I have know a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common.”
“Is there a more pitiable spectacle than that of a wife contending with others for that charm in her husband's sight which no philters and no prayers can renew when once it has fled forever?Women are so unwise. Love is like a bird's song beautiful and eloquent when heard in forest freedom, harsh and worthless in repetition when sung from behind prison bars.You cannot secure love by vigilance, by environment, by captivity. What use is it to keep the person of a man beside you if his soul be truant from you?”
“I only care for the subjective life; I am very German, you see: The woods interest me, and the world does not.”
“The world never leaves one in ignorance or in peace.”
“I do not wish to be a coward like the father of mankind and throw the blame upon a woman.”
“Intensely selfish people are always very decided as to what they wish. They do not waste their energies in considering the good of others.”
“He mistook, as the cleverest men often do mistake, in underrating the cruelty of women.”
“She was like a queen who beholds the virgin soil of her kingdom invaded and wasted by a traitor.Any other thing she would have pardoned: infidelity, indifference, cruelty, any sins of manhood's caprice or passion, but who should pardon this? The sin was not alone against herself; it was against every law of decency and truth that ever she had been taught to hold sacred; it was against all those great dead, who lay with the cross on their breasts and their swords by their side, from whom she had received and treasured the traditions of honor and purity of race.It was those dead knights whom he had smote upon the mouth and mocked, crying to them: 'Lo! your place is mine; my sons will reign in your stead. I have tainted your race forever; for every my blood flows with yours!'The greatness of a race is a thing far higher than mere pride. Its instincts are noble and supreme. Its obligations are no less than its privileges; it is a great light which streams backward through the darkness of the ages, and if by that light you guide not your footsteps, then are you thrice accursed, holding as you do that lamp of honor in your hands.So she had always thought, and now he had dashed the lamp in the dust.--"Wanda”
“Woman's fatal weakness is to desire sympathy and comprehension.--"Wanda”
“One must pray first, but afterwards one must help oneself. God does not care for cowards.--"Wanda”
“There are wrongs for which religion makes no provision, and of which it has no comprehension.--"Wanda”
“What we love once, we love forever. Shall there be joy in heaven over those who repent, yet no forgiveness for them upon earth?--"Wanda”
“In the violent scorn of her revolted pride, of her indignant honor, had she forgotten a lowlier yet harder duty left undone?In her contempt and dread of yielding to mere amorous weakness had she stifled and denied the cry of pity, the cry of conscience?To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite. To forgive wrongs darker than death or night. To defy power which seems omnipotent. To love and live to hope till hope creates from it's own wreck the thing it contemplates. Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent.This had been the higher, diviner way which she had missed, this obligation from the passion of the past which she had left unfulfilled, unaccepted.Now the misgiving arose in her whether she had mistaken arrogance for duty; whether, cleaving so closely to honor she had forgotten the obligation of mercy.”
“Take hope from the heart of man and you make him a beast of prey.”
“Familiarity is a magician that is cruel to beauty but kind to ugliness.”
“Her life had been altogether artificial; she had always been a great garden lily in a hot-house, she had never known what it was to be blown by a fresh breeze on a sun-swept moorland like a heather flower. The hot-house shelters from all chills and is full of perfume, but you can see no horizon from it; that alone is the joy of the moorland.”
“To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.”