Dorothy Canfield Fisher Quotes

One reason we haven't any national art is because we have too much magnificence. All our capacity for admiration is used up on the splendor of palace-like railway stations and hotels. Our national tympanum is so deafened by that blare of sumptuousness that we have no ears for the still, small voice of beauty.

The richness and endless variety of human relationships ... that's what authors, even the finest and greatest, only succeed in hinting at. It's a hopeless business, like trying to dip up the ocean with a tea-spoon.

She was scrubbing furiously at a line of grease spots which led from the stove towards the door to the dining-room. That was where Henry had held the platter tilted as he carried the steak in yesterday. And yet if she had warned him once about that, she had a thousand times!

The actions of a human being, even of fifteen months of age, may not be without significance to a sympathetic eye.

The encounter with death is the great turning-point in the lives of those who live on.

Anybody who knows anything knows how delicate and exacting a matter it is to try to tune in harmony two human beings, almost constitutionally out of tune even with themselves, full of strange complicated weaknesses and unexpected beauties and strength. Add to that the element of children, each of whom brings a full equipment of strange unexplored possiblities, and any fool can see that no outside complications are needed to make the problem a difficult one.
"Marital Relations

It is not good for all our wishes to be filled; through sickness we recognize the value of health; through evil, the value of good; through hunger, the value of food; through exertion, the value of rest.

Taking somebody's sacrifices is like taking counterfeit money. You're only the poorer.

This time Elizabeth Ann didn't answer, because she herself didn't know what the matter was. But I do, and I'll tell you. The matter was that never before had she known what she was doing in school. She had always thought she was there to pass from one grade to another, and she was ever so startled to get a little glimpse of the fact that she was there to learn how to read and write and cipher and generally use her mind, so she could take care of herself when she came to be grown up. Of course, she didn't really know that till she did come to be grown up, but she had her first dim notion of it in that moment, and it made her feel the way you do when you're learning to skate and somebody pulls away the chair you've been leaning on and says, "Now, go it alone!

There are two ways to meet life; you may refuse to care until indifference becomes a habit, a defensive armor, and you are safe - but bored. Or you can care greatly, live greatly, until life breaks you on its wheel.

Father sticks to it that anything that promises to pay too much can't help being risky.

You think religion is what's inside a little building filled with pretty lights from stained glass windows. But it's not. It's wings! Wings!

If we could learn how to utilize all the intelligence and patent good will children are born with, instead of ignoring much of it - why - there might be enough to go around! There might be enough to solve our alarming human problems, to put an end to poverty, to stop waging wars.

Almost anything is enough to keep alive someone who wishes nothing for himself but time to write music ...

The teachers of small children are paid more than they were, but still far less than the importance of their work deserves, and they are still regarded by the unenlightened majority as insignificant compared to those who impart information to older children and adolescents, a class of pupils which, in the nature of things, is vastly more able to protect its own individuality from the character of the teacher.

You can't wish a body any worse luck than to get what he wants.

On New Year's Day every calendar, large and small, has the same number of dates. But we soon learn that the years are of very different lengths.

The matter was that never before had she known what she was doing in school. She had always thought she was there to pass from one grade to another, and she was ever so startled to get a glimpse of the fact that she was there to learn how to read and write and cipher and generally use her mind, so she could take care of herself when she came to be grown up.

Libraries are the vessels in which the seed corn for the future is stored.

I'm as fixed in my opinion as the man who thought he was a hard-boiled egg.

History is worth reading when it tells us truly what the attitude toward life was in the past.

Freedom is not worth fighting for if it means no more than license for everyone to get as much as he can for himself.

What we ought to realize about marriage is, first of all, that, like every other human relationship, it is a problem that is never completely solved and settled, once and for all, until both parties are dead and buried. And secondly, that it is an intensely personal affair and that nobody on earth can know as much about it as the two people involved. Consequently, advice and pressure from the outside are always given on the basis of insufficient information, and have at least a fifty-fifty chance of being wrong.
"Marital Relations

What better can any of us do than to reach for our own stars ... and know which they are?

That room was full to the brim of something beautiful,...Its name was Happiness.

Everyone bowed to that unwritten law of family life which ordains that, in the long run, everyone submerges his personal preference in the effort to conform to that of the member of the circle who complains most loudly and is most difficult to satisfy.

The minute your group gets so big you don't know anybody in it and they don't know you, there's hell to pay.

Gossip ... is only fiction produced by non-professionals.

A mom isn't an individual to lean on, but a person to generate leaning needless.

Vermont is the only place in America where I ever hear thrift spoken of with respect.

The most elementary experience of life proves that the effects of compulsion last exactly as long as the physical or moral club can be applied.

Oh, yes, of course I like music, too. Very much. It's so pleasant of an evening, especially when made by your friends at home. I often say I like it better than cards. Though I must say I do like a good game of bridge.

Professional psychologists seem to think that they are the only people who make sense out of human actions. The rest of us know that everybody tries to do just this. What else is gossip?

Compared with more emotional types, Vermonters seem to have few passions. But those they have are great and burning. The greatest is their conviction that without freedom human life is not worth living.

I never heard of anybody who admired the character of sheep. Even the gentlest human personalities in contact with them are annoyed by their lack of brains, courage and initiative, by their extraordinary ability to get themselves into uncomfortable or dangerous situations and then wait in inert helplessness for someone to rescue them.

If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks' vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.

Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.

Never since the dawn of human history, as far as I can find out, did people long settled in any region give a friendly welcome to newcomers. One of the disagreeable traits of our human nature seems to be to dislike on sight people who come later than the first settlers.

Help that is not positively necessary is a hindrance to a growing organism.

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you've conquered human nature .

I declare! Sometimes it seems to me that every time a new piece of machinery comes into the door some of our wits fly out the window!