New England Quotes

The design of those commissioners, frigates and warlike force is directed rather against Long Island and these your Honors' possessions, than to the imagined reform of New England. ~ Peter Stuyvesant

I'm drawn to New England because that's where my roots are, and I miss it. I come from many generations of New Englanders, and so, in my writing, I've been drawn back there to the landscape and the light and the type of personality that's revealed. ~ Elizabeth Strout

He had an accent. A British one. There was something about a British accent that had always made me quiver deep down inside and touched me in places a regular New England accent just couldn't reach. ~ Chelsea M. Cameron

We should have scant notion of the gardens of these New England colonists in the seventeenth century were it not for a cheerful traveller named John Josselyn, a man of everyday tastes and much inquisitiveness, and the pleasing literary style which comes from directness, and an absence of self-consciousness. ~ Alice Morse Earle

New England waters are some of my favorite - they are some of the richest waters because they are temperate waters and nutrient-rich, and therefore provide food for so many animals, from giant whales to sharks to everything else. ~ Brian Skerry

Salem"

In salem seasick spindrift drifts or skips
to the canvas flapping on the seaward panes
until the knitting sailor stabs at ships
nosing like sheep of Morpheus through his brain's
asylum. Seaman, seaman, how the draft
lashes the oily slick about your head,
beating up whitecaps! Seaman, Charon's raft
dumps its damned goods into the harbor-bed,--
There sewage sickens the rebellious seas.
Remember, seaman, Salem fisherman
Once hung their nimble fleets on the Great Banks.
Where was it that New England bred the men
who quartered the Leviathan's fat flanks
and fought the British Lion to his knees? ~ Robert Lowell

There was a young lady from Gloucester
Who complained that her parents both bossed her,
So she ran off to Maine.
Did her parents complain?
Not at all
they were glad to have lost her. ~ John Ciardi

I never bought into the whole "second amendment" argument as it relates to the 21st century. Originally, it was put into place for the simple reason that our forefathers were fighting or had just fought off a government that threatened them with weapons. If those in the revolution had no weapons, there would be no United States of America, but rather New England of the New World. So, I understood why they thought it was so important. ~ Martin Manley

People tell me that I am well-grounded. I am sane in the New England sense of the word. ~ Ali MacGraw

Indeed, the zeal of Boston's rank-and-file marathoners rivaled, and in some ways echoed, the religious passion of Nathaniel Howe and his congregation. The runners indulged in orgies of self-denial-running 100 miles a week, working junk )ohs in order to have time to train, paying their own way to races, banding together in ascetic cells, forgoing the temptations of an idolatrous world in order to attain grace and salvation out on the road. As in Puritan New England, grace was not blithely attained. A believer-a runner-earned it by losing toenails and training down to bone and muscle, just as the Puritans formed calluses on their knees from
praying. No one made a cent from their strenuous efforts. The running life, like the spiritual life, was its own reward. ~ John Brant

New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan while the American empire careens onward toward its unpredicted end ... It is the first American section to be finished to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization, the first permanent civilization in America. ~ Bernard DeVoto

If you don't like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes. ~ Mark Twain

From purest wells of English undefiled None deeper drank than he, the New World's Child, Who in the language of their farm field spoke The wit and wisdom of New England folk. ~ John Greenleaf Whittier

In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great god Pan is not dead, as was rumored. No god ever dies. Perhaps of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his shrine. ~ Henry David Thoreau

We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste, - sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar…. ~ Henry David Thoreau

It is hardly surprising that to this day New England is considered to be the pie capital of America, whose inhabitants traditionally eat (sweet) pie for breakfast. Apple pies in particular became deeply embedded in the history of America - associated with the old country, the new country and the pioneering spirit, and indelibly identified with the sense of nationhood and patriotic sentiment. ~ Janet Clarkson

What made such a plan seem workable was that for the early pluralists and their multicultural descendants society would have fewer and fewer traditional groups. The kind of pluralist society that Dewey and Kallen envisaged would go beyond rooted ethnic communities. It would become the evolving creation of "free" individual participants, setting goals under scientific direction and having their material interests monitored by a "conductor state." The world as conceived by pluralists was there to be managed and to be made culturally safe for its framers: Eastern and Central European Jews fearful of traditional Gentile mores and the uprooted descendants of New England Calvinists looking for the New Jerusalem under scientific management. ~ Paul Edward Gottfried

The actual fund is called "THE JIMMY FUND" and THE REDSOX FOUNDATION IN BOSTON has gotten involved and people all over New England are very supportive of this effort. The Jimmy Fund is an official charity of the Boston Red Sox and my song "Down at Fenway Park" is often played at Fenway and if you buy the C.D. a portion of the proceeds go to the Jimmy Fund via the Red Sox Foundation. ~ Freddy Cannon

There they lived on, those New England people, farmer lives, father and grandfather and great-grandfather, on and on without noise, keeping up tradition, and expecting, beside fair weather and abundant harvests, we did not learn what. They were contented to live, since it was so contrived for them, and where their lines had fallen. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Ere so sober Emily/ Did New England sow/ With brooms of activity/ I'd the tree-rock spoken to. ~ Jack Kerouac

Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston. ~ John Updike

The preoccupation of American historical and literary scholars with the New England Puritans must seem to outsiders like an obsession. ~ Edmund Morgan

She came from people who thought they were too good to run from the cold, too hearty, too real. Fern allowed herself only short dreams of summer, properly earned summer, after winter and after spring. ~ Ramona Ausubel

The courage of New England was the courage of conscience. It did not rise to that insane and awful passion, the love of war for itself. ~ Rufus Choate

As Day and other observers had reported, the slaves were leading very comfortable lives. After this tactic [slave rebellions in the South] failed, it became obvious to the conspirators that an actual military invasion was the only solution to their campaign. The merchant bankers of New England, who were directly controlled by the Rothschilds, were no instructed to finance a military attack against the South. Their instrumentality was the already well-known terrorist, John Brown. He was financed by a group famed as "the Secret Six". ~ Eustace Mullins

In New England, farmers say, "If you don't like the weather, wait a minute!" Meaning, of course, that New England weather is constantly changing. This is like the brain and its mind. ~ J. Allan Hobson

I think that going to the beach as a child, being in the water and smelling that salt air and hearing the seagulls, it had a real calming effect. But also, it was a mysterious thing - I remember wondering what was under those dark New England seas. ~ Brian Skerry

New England clam chowder, made as it should be, is a dish to preach about, to chant praises and sing hymns and burn incense before. [ ... ] It is as American as the Stars and Stripes, as patriotic as the national Anthem. It is Yankee Doodle in a kettle. ~ Joseph C. Lincoln

But, well-endowed as Mrs. Rumfoord was, she still did troubled things like chaining a dog's skeleton to the wall, like having the gates of the estate bricked up, like letting the famous formal gardens turn into New England jungle. The moral: Money, position, health, handsomeness and talent aren't everything. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

In this swarm of cigarettes and dark sophistication they appeared here and there like figures from an allegory; or long-dead celebrants from some forgotten garden party ~ Donna Tartt

One of the earliest institutions in every New England community was a pair of stocks. The first public building was a meeting-house, but often before any house of God was builded, the devil got his restraining engine. ~ Alice Morse Earle

There are more people of Irish descent in Boston and surrounding New England than there are in Ireland. ~ Anonymous

Growing up in Boston, I was always Matt, Son of Former New England Patriot Don. And then when my brother Tim was a senior in high school, I became Matt, Brother of Tim. ~ Matt Hasselbeck

If there ever was a militant religion, it was that of early New England. ~ Paul Harris

There were no earthworms in New England when the European colonists arrived. ~ Randall Munroe

But, while Starkfield is modeled on a fairly specific place (New England), we can also think of it as any place that a person gets stuck in, any place where it seems impossible to stay, and impossible to leave. This can be a geographical location, a state of mind, a building or a city, or tiny kitchen on a broken down farm.

When we notice that there is also a "Springfield" in the story, we realize that Starkfield (stark meaning, hard, bare, difficult) really is supposed to be the place of eternal hardship. Springfield is the place Zeena goes to visit doctors and get medicine. This is perhaps to emphasize that Starkfield has the absolute worst kind of winters you can imagine. This also emphasizes that spring (and health) is always a false promise for the characters ~ Unknown

Machine chaos on Earth, Too many bodies, mouths bleeding on every Continent ~ Allen Ginsberg

My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. ~ John Irving

I think the [New England] Patriots' season should have an asterisk next to it because everything they're accomplishing is against teams coached by people other than me. ~ Zach Braff

It is indeed a tricky name. It is often misspelt, because the eye tends to regard the "a" of the first syllable as a misprint and then tries to restore the symmetrical sequence by triplicating the "o"- filling up the row of circles, so to speak, as in a game of crosses and naughts. No-bow-cough. How ugly, how wrong. Every author whose name is fairly often mentioned in periodicals develops a bird-watcher's or caterpillar-picker's knack when scanning an article. But in my case I always get caught by the word "nobody" when capitalized at the beginning of a sentence. As to pronunciation, Frenchmen of course say Nabokoff, with the accent on the last syllable. Englishmen say Nabokov, accent on the first, and Italians say Nabokov, accent in the middle, as Russians also do. Na-bo-kov. A heavy open "o" as in "Knickerbocker". My New England ear is not offended by the long elegant middle "o" of Nabokov as delivered in American academies. The awful "Na-bah-kov" is a despicable gutterism. Well, you can make your choice now. Incidentallv, the first name is pronounced Vladeemer- rhyming with "redeemer"- not Vladimir rhyming with Faddimere (a place in England, I think). ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I think it was the occasion of the final psychological break with Great Britain, in a way that had clearly not happened to that date, especially in New England and to som degree in the South. ~ Charles R. Morris

The New England conscience does not stop you from doing what you shouldn't-it just stops you from enjoying it. ~ Cleveland Amory

A missle lost Unprogrammed ~ Allen Ginsberg

Wonder-Working Providences of Sion's Saviour in New England, ~ Peter Marshall

Because I was a Wheelwright-and, therefore, a New England snob-I'd assumed that Phoenix was largely composed of Mormons and Baptists and Republicans; ~ John Irving

I don't know how many more times I'll be in New England again. But I leave coach Belichick and those guys with a salute: 'I love you guys. I miss you. I'm out.' ~ Randy Moss

He was a regular Yankee from New England. The Yankees are noted for making the most cruel overseers. ~ William Wells Brown

New England has two factors to get them ready to play. They've consistently been, if not the best, the second best team all year and they're playing confidently. And a lot of those guys were on field when they lost to LA. They'll take motivation in that. ~ Landon Donovan

That GOP leadership, that establishment, they've got to get their stuff together I love what they believe in, I believe in it too. But they've got to get tough, man. You know what? It's not just the New England Patriots who are dealing with deflated balls right now. ~ Sarah Palin

Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England. ~ John Irving

A recent study of three thousand New England high-school kids shows that students with B averages or better enjoyed seventeen to thirty-three minutes more sleep and went to bed ten to fifty minutes earlier than students with C averages. ~ Roger Angell

It can remind you of the bias of provincial New England, whose higher culture has been so exclusively one of books that it has grown incapable even of appraising the worth of other modes of expression ~ F.O. Matthiessen

If we look back into history for the character of present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practised it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England, blamed persecution in the Roman church, but practised it against the Puritans: these found it wrong in the Bishops, but fell into the same practice themselves both here and in New England.
[Letter to the London Packet, 3 June 1772] ~ Benjamin Franklin

The summer, in some climates, makes possible to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his Food, is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food generally is more various, and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half unnecessary. At the present day, and in this country, as I find by my own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, etc., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live - that is, keep comfortably warm - and die in New England at last. ~ Henry David Thoreau

My great-grandfather fought with the Colonial Army in New England in the American Revolution. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Wallace Worthington would have reminded Wilbur Larch of someone he might have met at the Channing-Peabodys', where Dr. Larch went to perform his second abortion – the rich people's abortion, as Larch thought of it. Wallace Worthington would strike Homer Wells as what a real King of New England should look like. ~ John Irving

Reading Chip's college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England winters can be very cold. The curtains he'd bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric with a backing of foam rubber. They were heavy and bulky and stiff. "You'll appreciate these on a cold night," he told Chip. "You'll be surprised how much they cut down drafts." But Chip's freshman roommate was a prep-school product named Roan McCorkle who would soon be leaving thumbprints, in what appeared to be Vaseline, on the fifth-grade photo of Denise. Roan laughed at the curtains and Chip laughed, too. He put them back in the box and stowed the box in the basement of the dorm and let it gather mold there for the next four years. He had nothing against the curtains personally. They were simply curtains and they wanted no more than what any curtains wanted - to hang well, to exclude light to the best of their ability, to be neither too small nor too large for the window that it was their task in life to cover; to be pulled this way in the evening and that way in the morning; to stir in the breezes that came before rain on a summer night; to be much used and little noticed. There were numberless hospitals and retirement homes and budget motels, not just in the Midwest but in the East as well, where these particularly brown rubber-backed curtains could have had a long and useful life. It wasn't their fault that they didn't belong in a dorm room. They'd betrayed no urge to ris ~ Jonathan Franzen

The habit of doubt; of distrusting his own judgment and of totally rejecting the judgment of the world; the tendency to regard every question as open; the hesitation to act except as a choice of evils; the shirking of responsibility; the love of line, form, quality; the horror of ennui; the passion for companionship and the antipathy to society
all these are well-known qualities of New England character in no way peculiar to individuals but in this instance they seemed to be stimulated by the fever, and Henry Adams could never make up his mind whether, on the whole, the change of character was morbid or healthy, good or bad for his purpose. ~ Henry Adams

I'm from Connecticut, and we don't have any dialects. Well, I don't think we have any dialects, and yeah, it's very complex. That Rhode Island/Massachusetts New England region is arguably the hardest dialect to nail. ~ Seth MacFarlane

Now that I'm 50 and respectably settled in New England and markedly happier and more contented than I was in my youth, I modestly hope there's time to realize some of my youthful goals before I croak, but I'll take what I can get. ~ Kate Christensen

Though born in Nova Scotia, I am of almost pure New England descent. ~ Simon Newcomb

As for what you're calling hard luck - well, we made New England out of it. That and codfish. ~ Stephen Vincent Benet

Anger falling asleep at the heart ~ Allen Ginsberg

We heard the army before we saw it.
The noise was like a cannon barrage combined with a football stadium crowd- like every Patriots fan in New England was charging us with bazookas. ~ Rick Riordan

In an ancient though not very populous settlement, in a retired corner of one of the New England states, arise the walls of a seminary of learning, which, for the convenience of a name, shall be entitled Harley College. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

On the 31st of August, 1846, I left Concord in Massachusetts for Bangor and the backwoods of Maine, ... I proposed to make excursions to Mount Ktaadn, the second highest mountain in New England, about thirty miles distant, and to some of the lakes of the Penobscot, either alone or with such company as I might pick up there. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go. I cannot think of it this way. It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections. The other night, driving through a hilly, wooded part of southern New England, I wondered about this. If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then, satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single cell ~ Lewis Thomas

I attended an extremely small liberal arts school. There were approximately 1,600 of us roaming our New England campus on a good day. My high school was bigger. My freshman year hourly calorie intake was bigger. ~ Sloane Crosley

Take any country that has laws against hate crimes, inspiring hatred and genocide and so on. The first thing they would do is ban the Old Testament. There's nothing like it in the literary canon that exalts genocide, to that extent. And it's not a joke either. Like where I live, New England, the people who liberated it from the native scourge were religious fundamentalist lunatics, who came waving the holy book, declaring themselves to be the children of Israel who are killing the Amalekites, like God told them. ~ Noam Chomsky

It did not come naturally; in fact, it would be difficult to conceive of any more dogmatic and less tolerant people than the first settlers on New England shores. ~ Paul Harris

In 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, Grant, aged thirty-nine, with four children at home and scarcely a penny in the bank, had made no mark on the world and looked unlikely to do so, for all the boom conditions of mid-century America. His Plymouth Rock ancestry, his specialist education, his military rank, which together must have ensured him a sheltered corner in the life of the Old World, counted for nothing in the New. He lacked the essential quality to be what Jacques Barzun has called a "booster," one of those bustling, bonhomous, penny-counting, chance-grabbing optimists who, whether in the frenetic commercial activity of the Atlantic coast, in the emergent industries of New England and Pennsylvania or on the westward-moving frontier, were to make America's fortune. Grant, in his introspective and undemonstrative style, was a gentleman, and was crippled by the quality. ~ John Keegan

I could never think of him in New England. When I lived in New England for a while and was separated from him by no more than fifty miles, I continued to imagine him as stuck in Italy somewhere, unreal and spectral. ~ Andre Aciman

Deprive the taboo rules of their original context, and they at once are apt to appear as a set of arbitrary prohibitions, as indeed they characteristically do appear when the initial context is lost, when those background beliefs in the light of which the taboo rules had originally been understood have not only been abandoned but forgotten.
In such a situation the rules have been deprived of any status that can secure their authority, and, if they do not acquire some new status quickly, both their interpretation and their justification become debatable. When the resources of a culture are too meagre to carry through the task of reinterpretation, the task of justification becomes impossible. Hence perhaps the relatively easy, although to some contemporary observers astonishing, victory of Kamehameha II over the taboos (and the creation thereby of a vacuum in which the banalities of the New England Protestant missionaries were received all too quickly). ~ Alasdair MacIntyre

Books
they come home hot in your hands and then by increments they warm your life, like heated bricks in a New England bed. ~ Robin R. Meyers

I would like to say something, not just to Vietnam veterans in New England, but to men who were in Vietnam, who I hurt, or whose pain I caused to deepen because of the things that I said or did. I was trying to help end the killing and the war, but there were times when I was thoughtless and careless about it and I'm ... very sorry that I hurt them. And I want to apologize to them and their families. ~ Jane Fonda

She ran into the early-October afternoon. The light came at a low slant through the oaks across the street, gold and green, and how she loved that light. There was no light in the world like you saw in New England in early fall. ~ Joe Hill

I've set the vast majority of my books in New England because that's where I live. I love this part of the country the gentle hills, the lush forests, the cycles of the seasons, the ocean, the quiet lakes and rivers that spread across the region. And, then of course, there's that Yankee spirit, which is a combination of optimism and responsibility, rugged individualism and a strong sense of community. I consider myself and my characters very lucky to live in New England. ~ Judith Arnold

In spite of all that is said, and more especially written, about the crabbed New Englander, New Englanders, like all ordinary people, are nice. Their manner of proffering a favor is sometimes on the crusty side, but that is much more often diffidence than surliness. ~ Louise Dickinson Rich

Transferring in haste, I felt a curious breathlessness as the cars rumbled on through the early afternoon sunlight into territories I had always read of but had never before visited. I knew I was entering an altogether older-fashioned and more primitive New England than the mechanised, urbanised coastal and southern areas where all my life had been spent; an unspoiled, ancestral New England without the foreigners and factory-smoke, billboards and concrete roads, of the sections which modernity has touched. There would be odd survivals of that continuous native life whose deep roots make it the one authentic outgrowth of the landscape - -the continuous native life which keeps alive strange ancient memories, and fertilises the soil for shadowy, marvellous, and seldom-mentioned beliefs. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

CHAPTER XX. THE MINISTER IN A MAZE CHAPTER XXI. THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY CHAPTER XXII. THE PROCESSION CHAPTER XXIII. THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hairy Mammal whaddya want ~ Allen Ginsberg

Quoting Kipling, I never got over the wonder of a people who, having extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more completely than any modern race had ever done, honestly believed they were a godly little New England community, setting examples to mankind. ~ Sarah Vowell

I'm confident in my ability to maintain a career. I don't know if it will be doing either independent films or plays in New England. ~ Randy Harrison

I'm a working-class kid from a blue-collar New England family. ~ R.A. Salvatore

Today we take New England clam chowder as something traditional that makes our roots as American cooking very solid, with a lot of foundation. But the first person who decided to mix potatoes and clams and bacon and cream, in his own way 100 to 200 years ago, was a modernist. ~ Jose Andres

In the end, both sides wanted what the Pilgrims had been looking for in 1620: a place unfettered by obligations to others. But from the moment Massasoit decided to become the Pilgrims' ally, New England belonged to no single group. For peace and for survival, others must be accommodated. The moment any of them gave up on the difficult work of living with their neighbors - and all of the compromise, frustration, and delay that inevitably entailed - they risked losing everything. It was a lesson that Bradford and Massasoit had learned over the course of more than three long decades. That it could be so quickly forgotten by their children remains a lesson for us today. ~ Nathaniel Philbrick

I think one of the reasons Stephen King's stories work so well is that he places his stories in spooky old New England, where a lot of American folk legends came from. ~ Ted Naifeh

The men could be easily distinguished as fellow Americans by the quality of their mustaches and the innocent and amicable expressions on their faces; the several women could only have come from New England, making this clear, he felt, by their willingness to allow their menfolk the right to speak at length while confining their own talk to short and brisk, intelligent interruptions or slightly disagreeable remarks once the men had finished. ~ Colm Toibin

My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education. ~ John Knowles

I've got a lot of things that are probably obvious, not much outside the box right now. But, I have been listening to a lot of classical music lately for some reason. I used to do that a lot when I was doing cabinet making in New England. I've sort of returned to that for some reason. That might be surprising to people. ~ Hal Ketchum

There are areas of New England, plenty of them, with quaintness to spare, with color-changing leaves and folksy folks full of folksy homespun wisdom accompanied by folksy accents ~ A. Lee Martinez

Nathaniel Taggart had been a penniless adventurer who had come from somewhere in New England and built a railroad across a continent, in the days of the first steel rails. His railroad still stood; his battle to build it had dissolved into a legend, because people preferred not to understand it or to believe it possible. ~ Ayn Rand

Another of Mack's patients says that the aliens have been taking eggs from her since she was sexually mature, and that her reproductive system baffles her gynecologist. Is it baffling enough to write the case up and submit a research paper to The New England Journal of Medicine? Apparently it's not that baffling. ~ Carl Sagan

I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either. ~ John Updike

Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for
annually, not oftener
if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors, the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man's side, consequently on the Lord's side; hence it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments. ~ Mark Twain

In the East, he then believed, a man went to college not for vocational training but in disciplined search for wisdom and beauty, and nobody over the age of twelve believed that those words were for sissies. In the East, wearing rumpled tweeds and flannels, he could have strolled for hours among ancient elms and clock towers, talking with his friends, and his friends would have been the cream of their generation. The girls of the East were marvelously slim and graceful; they moved with the authority of places like Bennington and Holyoke; they spoke intelligently in low, subtle voices, and they never giggled. On sharp winter evenings you could meet them for cocktails at the Biltmore and take them to the theater, and afterwards, warmed with brandy, they would come with you for a drive to a snowbound New England inn, where they'd slip happily into bed with you under an eiderdown quilt. In the East, when college was over, you could put off going seriously to work until you'd spent a few years in a book-lined bachelor flat, with intervals of European travel, and when you found your true vocation at last it was through a process of informed and unhurried selection; just as when you married at last it was to solemnize the last and best of your many long, sophisticated affairs. ~ Richard Yates

Oh ... why not?' he smiled. "This valley is a pleasant spot for meditation. I like New England ... it is here that I have experienced some of my greatest successes - and several notable defeats. Defeat, you know, is not such a bad thing, if there's not too much of it ... it makes for humility, and humility makes for caution, therefore for safety.' ("Trace") ~ Jerome Bixby

I believe it is conceded that, notwithstanding the fabled blue laws of New England, a man may, without impropriety, kiss his wife on Sunday and possibly, if he have a chance, some other sweet-faced woman. ~ David Josiah Brewer

But the time will come when New England will be as thickly peopled as old England. Wages will be as low, and will fluctuate as much with you as with us. You will have your Manchesters and Birminghams; and, in those Manchesters and Birminghams, hundreds of thousands of artisans will assuredly be sometimes out of work. Then your institutions will be fairly brought to the test. ~ Thomas B. Macaulay

Training need not be an all-or-nothing battle, involving punishing track practice, grueling calisthenics, and wrenching interval sessions every afternoon. It could be a fun and easy cruise through the gorgeous New England countryside. It could be an act of freedom by which I could step outside myself and my racing mind. A long run in nature could even be a way to connect my physical body with the unseen spirit of the universe. ~ Bill Rodgers