Mary Webb Quotes

I've thought since that when folk grumble about this and that and be not happy, it is not the fault of creation, that is like a vast mere full of good, but it is the fault of their bucket's smallness. ~ Mary Webb

She had for so many years been trying to be like other people, that she was now like nothing in heaven or earth. ~ Mary Webb

Nature's music is never over; her silences are pauses, not conclusions. ~ Mary Webb

Give me good digestion, Lord, And also something to digest; but where and how that something comes I leave to Thee, who knoweth best. ~ Mary Webb

She had so deep a kinship with the trees, so intuitive a sympathy with leaf and flower, that it seemed as if the blood in her veins was not slow-moving human blood, but volatile sap. ~ Mary Webb

Green is the fresh emblem of well founded hopes. In blue the spirit can wander, but in green it can rest. ~ Mary Webb

If you stop to be kind, you must swerve often from your path. ~ Mary Webb

To many women marriage is only this. It is merely a physical change impinging on their ordinary nature, leaving their mentality untouched, their self-possession intact. They are not burnt by even the red fire of physical passion - far less by the white fire of love. ~ Mary Webb

Saddle your dreams before you ride em. ~ Mary Webb

I'd laboured over it a long while, and labour brings a thing near the heart's core. ~ Mary Webb

No accident of environment or circumstance need cut us off from nature ... It does not matter how shut in we are. Opportunity for wide experience is of small acccount in this as in other things; it is depth that brings understanding and life. ~ Mary Webb

We are tomorrow's past. ~ Mary Webb

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past. ~ Mary Webb

The well of Providence is deep. It's the buckets we bring to it that are small. ~ Mary Webb

For the world is founded and built up on death, and the reality of death is neither to be questioned nor feared. Death is a dark dream, but it is not a nightmare. It is mankind's lack of pity, mankind's fatal propensity for torture, that is the nightmare. ~ Mary Webb

Love unspoken is the most tremendous force in the world. One is amazed at the way in which people waste their time making speeches, agitating, praying, even. They might save their breath. The great lovers of the world, in silence, rule the world. ~ Mary Webb

The more anybody wants a thing, the more they do think others want it. ~ Mary Webb

We are tomorrow's past. Even now we slip away like those pictures painted on the moving dials of antique clocks - a ship, a cottage, sun and moon, a nosegay. The dial turns, the ship rides up and sinks again, the yellow painted sun has set, and we, that were the new thing, gather magic as we go. The whirr of the spinning wheels has ceased in our parlours, and we hear no more the treadles of the loom, the swift, silken noise of the flung shuttle, the intermittent thud of the batten. But the imagination hears them, and theirs is the melody of romance." ~ from Mary Webb's introduction to her novel Precious Bane. ~ Mary Webb

Tomorrow is a word of hope,I do believe ! ~ Mary Webb

Fragrance is the voice of inanimate things. ~ Mary Webb

I thought she had a good heart, though not much respectability- or maybe it was because of that. ~ Mary Webb

Autumn is full of leave-taking. ~ Mary Webb

I do believe all shall be well with you, Prue. It's come to my heart as soft as dew, and as sweet as a red rose, that you'll get love as well as give it. After my time, though, after my time. But no matter for that, so I do know it's to come. ~ Mary Webb

It is the way of lovers to think that none can bless or succour their love but their own selves. And there is a touch of truth in it, maybe more than a touch. ~ Mary Webb

He was ever a strong man, which is almost the same, times, as to say a man with little time for kindness. For if you stop to be kind, you must swerve often from your pat. So when folk tell me of this great man and that great man, I think to myself, Who was stinted of joy for his glory? How many old folk and children did his coach wheels go over? What bridal lacked his song, and what mourner his tars, that he found time to climb so high? ~ Mary Webb

And, at night, in a narrow bed in her old room, Mary Morevna would hold Ivan tight inside of her, demanding his obedience to her, demanding that his soul be ripped out and emptied into her. ~ Catherynne M Valente

We all learn to bury a broken heart beneath layers of dignity ~ Mary Balogh

Suddenly, I realised: this was what I wanted to do. I didn't know how to do it; I just knew acting felt right. ~ Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio

No time is really wasted unless one never learns the lessons that it offers. ~ Mary Balogh

Drive down any road,

take a train or an airplane
across the world, leave
your old life behind,

die and be born again~
wherever you arrive
they'll be there first,

glossy and rowdy
and indistinguishable.
The deep muscle of the world. ~ Mary Oliver

The crickets were rubbing their hind legs together, unrolling that endless band of sound that when combined with the sound of the sycamore trees losing their heads in the heat-thickened breeze could cause even a girl as unsentimental as Mary to feel like she'd just left something behind on the porch stoop she couldn't bear to live without. ~ Kathryn Davis

My gut feeling says he needs a second chance. Like we all do." WINTER'S PAST ~ Mary E. Hanks

If you are going through hell, why the heck are you stopping to worry? ~ Jacent Mary Mpalyenkana

There are people who are very highly paid to cover the truth and who will protect their clients. ~ Mary Hart

Picture yourself five years from now. Where do you want to be? Remember that. Every day. That's how you'll get there. ~ Mary E. Pearson

Mathematics had never had more than a secondary interest for him [her husband, George Boole]; and even logic he cared for chiefly as a means of clearing the ground of doctrines imagined to be proved, by showing that the evidence on which they were supposed to give rest had no tendency to prove them. ~ Mary Everest Boole

By turning herself into a fucking machine, she has created a kind of temporary grid. But underneath, in the place of dream and feeling, she is going places that she, on the surface, would not understand. ~ Mary Gaitskill

It was so kind of you to write to me about your experiences during the Occupation. At the war's end, I, too, promised myself that I had done with talking about it. I had talked and lived war for six years, and I was longing to pay attention to something - anything - else. But that is like wishing I were someone else. The war is now the story of our lives, and there's no subtracting it. ~ Mary Ann Shaffer

You can live through most anything as long as you have the right tranquilizers on hand. ~ Mary Guterson

In this study, we have tried to focus on timeless biblical principles rather than the specific application of those principles. ~ Mary A. Kassian

What sort of person experimentally infests a child with maggots? A confident sort, certainly. A maverick. Someone comfortable with the unpretty facts of biology. Someone who is perhaps himself an unpretty fact of biology. ~ Mary Roach

I look at Danny. If I'd thrown a torn-up wishlist into a fireplace, he's the guy Mary Poppins would have delivered. ~ Sally Thorne

A Dream of Trees

There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees,
A quiet house, some green and modest acres
A little way from every troubling town,
A little way from factories, school, laments.
I would have time, I thought, and time to spare,
With only streams and birds for company,
To build out of my life a few wild stanzas.
And then it came to me, that so was death,
A little way away from everywhere. ~ Mary Oliver

World peace starts with the Creator- Jesus!! ~ Mary Kate

I really dislike it when women reject feminism; that's ridiculous. I am a product of feminism. Without feminism I would not be making films. ~ Mary Harron

How can people trust the harvest, unless they see it sown? ~ Mary Renault

These memories descend out of nowhere, giving me pieces of who I was, but their significance is lost. I sigh and resume my walk, not knowing if this memory is important, or just more of the jumbled trivia of Jenna's life, like sock shopping. Maybe that is all any life is composed of, trivia that eventually adds up to a person, and maybe I just don't have enough of it yet to be a whole one. ~ Mary E. Pearson

A hawk reeled overhead with a rodent squirming in its beak, close enough so you could see the bird's black shiny eyes. ~ Mary Karr

I realized early on in writing the book that it needed to be from a family point of view, and that nobody outside the family would weigh in. And then well into writing it, the question became how to balance the perspectives; how to switch between chapters. ~ Mary Kay Zuravleff

Have I lived enough?
Have I loved enough?
Have I considered Right Action enough, have I
come to any conclusion?
Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude?
Have I endured loneliness with grace? - A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver ~ Mary Oliver

Now, about Markham V. Reynolds (Junior). Your questions regarding that gentleman are very delicate, very subtle, very much like being smacked in the head with a mallet. Am I in love with him? What kind of a question is that? It's a tuba among the flutes, and I expect better of you. The first rule of snooping is to come at it sideways - when you began writing me dizzy letters about Alexander, I didn't ask if you were in love with him, I asked what his favorite animal was. And your answer told me everything I needed to know about him - how many men would admit that they loved ducks? (This brings up an important point: I don't know what Mark's favorite animal is. I doubt it's a duck.) ~ Mary Ann Shaffer

Time was, I shrank from what was right, From fear of what was wrong; I would not brave the sacred fight, Because the foe was strong. But now I cast that finer sense And sorer shame aside; Such dread of sin was indolence, Such aim at heaven was pride. J. H. NEWMAN. ~ Mary W. Tileston

It is hardly surprising that women concentrate on the way they look instead of what is in their minds since not much has been put in their minds to begin with. ~ Mary Shelley

For 2,000 years, the Church has been the cradle in which Mary places Jesus and entrusts Him to the adoration and contemplation of all peoples. May the humility of the Bride cause to shine forth still more brightly the glory and power of the Eucharist, which she celebrates and treasures in her heart. In the sign of the consecrated Bread and Wine, Christ Jesus risen and glorified, the light of the nations, reveals the enduring reality of His Incarnation. He remains living and real in our midst in order to nourish the faithful with His Body and Blood. ~ Pope John Paul II

she told Rick Parker ~ Mary Higgins Clark

I Know what you meant when you told me she was full of love and brimming over with it. And so innocent that one fears for her. Perhaps we ought not to fear for such people but for ourselves whose experience has taught us not to trust one another or life itself. ~ Mary Balogh

But on the other hand, I look back at my career sometimes and can't believe how fast everything has gone and how much I've been able to accomplish. ~ Karrie Webb

Probably nothing in the experience of the rank and file of workers causes more bitterness and envy than the realization which comes sooner or later to many of them that they are "stuck" and can go no further. ~ Mary Barnett Gilson

Nonetheless, some prototype chimp suits had been developed, including the "SPCA Suit" - certified humane by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. "To prove that a suit was safe for a man, we were going to test it on a chimp, but to prove the suit was safe for a chimp, we had to test it on a man," U.S. Spacesuits coauthor Joe McMann said in an email. "That was a mind boggler. ~ Mary Roach

I wanted to just come out and continue to improve my game, continue to improve my mental capacity to play well in tournaments. I've had a slow year compared to last year, but I've been pleased because I felt like I was getting better. ~ Webb Simpson

People who didn't live pre-Internet can't grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. ~ Mary Karr

I'm anti-making new laws. I feel like assault is already against the law. ~ Mary Katharine Ham