42 Sarah Orne Jewett Quotes

Sarah Orne Jewett quotes

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. Captain Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading.

4. The old poets little knew what comfort they could be to a man.

5. 'Step in some afternoon,' he said, as affectionately as if I were a fellow-shipmaster wrecked on the lee shore of age like himself.

6. We were standing where there was a fine view of the harbor and its long stretches of shore all covered by the great army of the pointed firs, darkly cloaked and standing as if they waited to embark. As we looked far seaward among the outer islands, the trees seemed to march seaward still, going steadily over the heights and down to the water's edge.

7. Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading.

8. Yes'm, old friends is always best, 'less you can catch a new one that's fit to make an old one out of.

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

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

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

12. So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.

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

14. When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.

1. You must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.

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

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

4. When she walked...she stretched out long and thin like a little tiger, and held her head high to look over the grass as if she were treading the jungle.

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

6. The warm sun kissed the earthTo consecrate thy birth,And from his close embraceThy radiant faceSprang into sight,A blossoming delight.

7. 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.

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

9. I've found that people who look at things as they are, and not as they wish them to be, are the ones who succeed.

10. There is something out of gear about graded schools and all that. Memory is developed at the expense of what in general we are pleased to call thought and character.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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?

14. To let God make us, instead of painfully trying to make ourselves; to follow the path that his love shows us, instead of through conceit or cowardice or mockery choosing another; to trust Him for our strength and fitness as the flowers do, simply giving ourselves back to Him in grateful service,—this is to keep the laws that give us the freedom of the city in which there is no longer any night of bewilderment or ignorance or uncertainty.

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. My childhood is very vivid to me, and I don't feel very different now from the way I felt then. It would appear I am the very same person, only with wrinkles.

18. Wrecked on the lee shore of age.

19. 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.

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

21. 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.

22. 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.

23. 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.

24. Write it as it is, don't try to make it like this or that. You can't do it in anybody else's way-you will have to make a way of your own.

25. In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.

26. Don't scatter your fire! You are a prose writer: stick to your own tool!

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

28. 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.