Sarah Orne Jewett Quotes

It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance that knows what you know. I see so many of these new folks nowadays, that seem to have neither past nor future. 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.

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.

I took new pleasure in the thought that in a piece of wild pasture land like this one may get closest to Nature, and subsist upon what she gives of her own free will. There have been no drudging, heavy-shod ploughmen to overturn the soil, and vex it into yielding artificial crops. Here one has to take just what Nature is pleased to give, whether one is a yellow-bird or a human being.

There are plenty of people dragging themselves miserably through the world, because they are clogged and fettered with work for which they have no fitness... I can't help believing that nothing is better than to find one's work early and hold fast to it, and put all one's heart into it.

... [T]he ease that belongs to simplicity is charming enough to make up for whatever a simple life may lack, and the gifts of peace are not for those who live in the thick of battle.

The warm sun kissed the earth To consecrate thy birth, And from his close embrace Thy radiant face Sprang into sight, A blossoming delight.

Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading.

Then I had the good of my reading,” he explained presently. “I had no books; the pastor spoke but little English, and all his books were foreign; but I used to say over all I could remember. The old poets little knew what comfort they could be to a man. I was well acquainted with the works of Milton, but up there it did seem to me as if Shakespeare was the king; he has his sea terms very accurate, and some beautiful passages were calming to the mind. I could say them over until I shed tears; there was nothing beautiful to me in that place but the stars above and those passages of verse.

A community narrows down and grows dreadful ignorant when it is shut up to its own affairs, and gets no knowledge of the outside world except from a cheap, unprincipled paper.

Through this piece of rough pasture ran a huge shape of stone like the great backbone of an enormous creature. At the end, near the woods, we could climb up on it and walk along to the highest point; there above the circle of pointed firs we could look down over all the island, and could see the ocean that circled this and a hundred other bits of island-ground, the mainland shore and all the far horizons. It gave a sudden sense of space, for nothing stopped the eye or hedged one in, — that sense of liberty in space and time which great prospects always give.

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 over Will find the four-leaved clover.

be brisk, be splendid, and be public.

There's more women likes to be loved than there is of those that loves.

There is all the pleasure that one can have in golddigging in finding one’s hopes satisfied in the riches of a good hill of potatoes.

The coast of Maine was in former years brought so near to foreign shores by its busy fleet of ships that among the older men and women one still finds a surprising proportion of travelers. Each seaward-stretching headland with its high-set houses,