Remarks by Ada Cambridge | V2Melody Quotations

“The dear world in every part is Home to the spirit that loves life and freedom, and discerns no frontiers between nation and nation, nor barriers between man and man.”

A generous late-life vision of human belonging beyond national boundaries · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

“Of the many happy experiences of life, few can match that of finding you have been one of the deities of a faithful heart for over twenty years of absence without knowing it.”

On discovering that affection has endured faithfully through decades of separation · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

“Happily, the beauty of a beauty spot is not dependent on human or historical associations, and the Australian Bush fed fancy well when it had no other inspiration.”

Affirming that natural beauty can nourish imagination without inherited associations · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

“I flew to their arms as naturally and fearlessly as if I had lived with them in the flesh for as many years as we had otherwise known each other, and when I am dead I shall not be a dead author to them, but a dead woman.”

Describing authorship as a human relationship that can outgrow the printed page · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

“She did not mind harrowing my infant soul with fore-knowledge of the world's agonies, and I do not know that she was wrong.”

Reflecting on whether children should be sheltered from painful truths about life · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

“I always knew at the time that I could trust every word she said, and when I grew up I never had to learn that she had deceived me.”

A tribute to the lasting security created by truthfulness between parent and child · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

“If, as I hold, the first principle of beauty is suitability, the "ugly" was not ugly, and it deserved to live.”

Defining beauty through fitness to purpose rather than changing fashion · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

“It must be remembered that they could not be more sensible than fashion permitted, and that we are just as craven slaves to that impersonal tyrant as they were.”

Observing that every generation is constrained by the fashions it takes for granted · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

Time
Truth

“But, looking back, and trying to be strictly fair all round, I am not sure that the women of the fifties were so much less sensible (according to their lesser lights) than their descendants of to-day.”

Resisting easy assumptions of superiority over women of an earlier generation · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

Time
Truth

“At any rate the religious faith of the fifties as to which we were all children, young and old alike, it had one precious quality that it seems never likely to have again—it sufficed.”

Remembering an older faith chiefly for the completeness of assurance it gave believers · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

“Careful, delicate, faithful work, no matter on what article expended, was the note of excellence, and the longer I live the more I respect and love it.”

Honouring craftsmanship through patience, fidelity and attention to detail · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

“The handicraft of the women of the mid-Victorian era had the precious quality of finish and thoroughness, than which there is none more worthy.”

Praising care and completeness in work even when fashions themselves have passed · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

Art
Beauty

“The notion of making it a pleasure as well as a discipline, of breathing into its dry bones any breath of knowledgeable life, seemed not to occur to anybody.”

Arguing implicitly for learning that is alive, pleasurable and intellectually meaningful · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

“On the whole, school work was a deadly uninteresting, and therefore unprofitable, business in my time, no matter what the qualifications of teachers.”

Her criticism of education that failed because it failed to engage the learner · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

“I performed my part of this contract not wholly without pleasure in it, and I have no doubt that I owe to her my first taste for literature and the bent towards authorship which afterwards became a fixed line.”

Tracing her eventual vocation as a writer to an early influence on her reading · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

Art
Memory

“It is a sad reflection—the waste of valuable things in life, the persistent superfluity of the valueless.”

Lamenting how life can squander what matters while preserving what does not · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

“Home is a place that I never do get away from without immediately wishing myself back in it.”

A plain-spoken confession of her powerful attachment to home · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

Love
Memory

“If one could throw delicate scruples to the winds and tell the whole story of any human life, or portion of life, however small, the long reign of the work of fiction would be over.”

Suggesting that ordinary lives contain material richer than invented stories · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

“Evidently it is in the eye (backed by a strong imagination) of the gazer that poetic beauty lies.”

Locating poetic beauty partly in imagination rather than solely in the object observed · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

“Also, it is not until a woman is sixty, or thereabouts, that she is really free to enjoy herself.”

A wry celebration of the freedom that can accompany later life · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

“We never minded these little things, holding the view that a good servant was a good servant, and that her religion was her own business.”

A matter-of-fact statement of religious tolerance in everyday life · Memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903)

Faith
Truth

“Art, like Letters, is still an exotic in the land.”

Her pointed assessment of the cultural position of the arts in colonial Australia · Memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903)

Art
Poetry

“To a people so wandering and restless, books in quantities become physically burdensome; they take up too much room in a temporary house, and are too costly as travelling furniture.”

A practical observation on the tension between a love of books and an unsettled life · Memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903)

Art
Time

“During all my inland life at home and twenty-three years in the Australian bush, however happy I may have been, there was always that one thing wanting—the near neighbourhood, the salt breath of the sea.”

Describing a lifelong attachment to the sea that prosperity and happiness could not replace · Memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903)

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