Sarah Orne Jewett Quotes
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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.
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You never get over bein' a child long's you have a mother to go to.
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It is a splendid thing to have the use of any gift of God. It isn't for us to choose again, or wonder and dispute, but just work in our own places, and leave the rest to God.
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We have these instincts which defy all our wisdom and for which we never can frame any laws. ... They are powers which are imperfectly developed in this life, but one cannot help the thought that the mystery of this world may be the commonplace of the next.
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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.
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Do not hurry too fast in these early winter days, - a quiet hour is worth more to you than anything you can do in it.
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the mysterious moment of death proves to be a moment of waking. How one longs to take it for one's self!
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In the life of each of us there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness.
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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.
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This was one of those perfect New England days in late summer where the spirit of autumn takes a first stealing flight, like a spy, through the ripening country-side, and, with feigned sympathy for those who droop with August heat, puts her cool cloak of bracing air about leaf and flower and human shoulders.
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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.
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Wrecked on the lee shore of age.
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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.
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Don't scatter your fire! You are a prose writer: stick to your own tool!
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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.
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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.
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Tain't worthwhile to wear a day all out before it comes.
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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.
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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.
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So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.
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Look bravely up into the sky, And be content with knowing That God wished for a buttercup Just here, where you are growing.
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It is not often given in a noisy world to come to the places of great grief and silence.
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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.
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The warm sun kissed the earthTo consecrate thy birth,And from his close embraceThy radiant faceSprang into sight,A blossoming delight.