Sarah Orne Jewett Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Imagination is the only true thing in the world!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

What's everybody's business is nobody's business.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

A lean sorrow is hardest to bear.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.