Sarah Orne Jewett Quotes

In the life of each of us there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness.

It seemed sometimes as if love and hate and jealousy and adverse winds at sea might also find their proper remedies among the curious wild-looking plants in Mrs. Todd's garden.

Some set more by such things as come from a distance, but I rec'lect mother always used to maintain that folks was meant to be doctored with the stuff that grew right about 'em.

Find your quiet center of life and write from that to the world.

It is only unimaginative persons who can be really astonished. The imagination can always outrun the possible and actual sights and sounds of the world ...

Your patience may have long to wait,Whether in little things or great,But all good luck, you soon will learn,Must come to those who nobly earn.Who hunts the hay-field overWill find the four-leaved clover.

It is the people who can do nothing who find nothing to do, and the secret to happiness in this world is not only to be useful, but to be forever elevating one's uses.

The mysterious moment of death proves to be a moment of waking. How one longs to take it for one's self!

If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago ... you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up. Otherwise what might be strength in a writer is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation; sentimemnt falls to sentimentality - you can write about life, but never write life itself.

Life was resumed, and anxious living blew away as if it had not been. I could not breathe deep enough or long enough. It was a return to happiness.

Love isn't blind; it's only love that sees!

It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance that knows what you know. I see so many of these new folks nowadays, that seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation's got to have some root in the past, or else you've got to explain every remark you make, an' it wears a person out.

Tain't worthwhile to wear a day all out before it comes.

Her hospitality was something exquisite; she had the gift which so many women lack, of being able to make themselves and their houses belong entirely to a guest's pleasure,
that charming surrender for the moment of themselves and whatever belongs to them, so that they make a part of one's own life that can never be forgotten.

We are always looking forward to the passing and ending of winter, but when summer is here it seems as if summer must always last. As I went across the fields that day, I found myself half lamenting that the world must fade again, even that the best of her budding and bloom was only a preparation for another spring-time, for an awakening beyond the coming winter's sleep.

My friends plunged into a borderless sea of reminiscences and personal news.

Such a nice day - out all day up in the Carter Notch direction, trout-fishing, with the long drive there and the long drive home again in time for supper. It was a lovely brook and I caught seven good trout and one small one - which eight trout-persons you should have for your breakfast if only you were near enough. It was not alone the fishing, but the delightful loneliness and being out of doors.

The bright flower was like a face. Somehow, the beauty and life of it were surprising in the plain room, like a gay little child who might suddenly appear in a doorway.

It is not often given in a noisy world to come to the places of great grief and silence.

A harbor, even if it is a little harbor, is a good thing, since adventurers come into it as well as go out, and the life in it grows strong, because it takes something from the world, and has something to give in return.

Who was it said that you never get to a place until a day after you come, nor leave it until a day after you go?

The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.

You never get over bein' a child long's you have a mother to go to.

The road was new to me, as roads always are, going back.

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper - whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

There, don't you think I'm always a-fault-finding! When I get hold of the real thing in folks, I stick to 'em, - but there's an awful sight of poor material walking about that ain't worth the ground it steps on.

Satisfaction, even after one has dined well, is not so interesting and eager a feeling as hunger.

I couldn't help thinkin' if she was as far out o' town as she was out o' tune, she wouldn't get back in a day.

In these days the young folks is all copy-cats, 'fraid to death they won't be all just alike; as for the old folks, they pray for the advantage o' bein' a little different.

It seems to me like stealing, for men and women to live in the world and do nothing to make it better.

A story should be managed so that it should suggest interesting things to the reader instead of the author's doing all the thinking for him, and setting it before him in black and white.

I've got 's much feelin' as the next one, but when folks drives in their spiggits and wants to draw a bucketful o' compassion every day right straight along, there does come times when it seems as if the bar'l was getting low.

My dear father; my dear friend; the best and wisest man I ever knew, who taught me many lessons and showed me many things as we went together along the country by-ways.

There are plenty of people dragging themselves miserably through the world, because they are clogged and fettered with work for which they have no fitness ... I can't help believing that nothing is better than to find one's work early and hold fast to it, and put all one's heart into it.

There's more women likes to be loved than there is of those that loves.

Conformity is the inspiration of much second-rate virtue.

Look bravely up into the sky,
And be content with knowing
That God wished for a buttercup
Just here, where you are growing.

I saw William Blackett's escaping sail already far from land, and Captain Littlepage was sitting behind his closed window as I passed by, watching for some one who never came. I tried to speak to him, but he did not see me. There was a patient look on the old man's face, as if the world were a great mistake and he had nobody with whom to speak his own language or find companionship.

This is a very small world; we are all within hail of each other. I dare say when we get to Heaven there will not be a stranger to make friends with.

be brisk, be splendid, and be public.

There's some herb that's good for everybody, except for them that thinks they're sick when they ain't.

Imagination is the only true thing in the world!

Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading.

There is all the pleasure that one can have in golddigging in finding one's hopes satisfied in the riches of a good hill of potatoes.