Sarah Orne Jewett Quotes

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

We who were her neighbors were full of gayety, which was but the reflected light from her beaming countenance. It was not the first time that I was full of wonder at the waste of human ability in this world, as a botanist wonders at the wastefulness of nature, the thousand seeds that die, the unused provision of every sort. The reserve force of society grows more and more amazing to one's thought.

Dear robin," said this sad young flower, "Perhaps you'd not mind trying To find a nice white frill for me, Some day when you are flying?" "You silly thing!" the robin said; "I think you must be crazy! I'd rather be my honest self Than any made-up daisy. "You're nicer in your own bright gown, The little children love you; Be the best buttercup you can, And think no flower above you. "Though swallows leave me out of sight, We'd better keep our places; Perhaps the world would all go wrong With one too many daisies. "Look bravely up into the sky, And be content with knowing That God wished for a buttercup Just here, where you are growing.

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

It is in human nature to respect power; but all his
manliness was at stake, and his natural rights would be degraded and lost, if he could not show his power to be greater than her own.

I saw William Blackett’s escaping sail already far from land, and Captain Littlepage was sitting behind his closed window as I passed by, watching for some one who never came. I tried to speak to him, but he did not see me. 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.

I couldn't help thinkin' if she was as far out o' town as she was out o' tune, she wouldn't get back in a day.

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.

Her hospitality was something exquisite; she had the gift which so many women lack, of being able to make themselves and their houses belong entirely to a guest's pleasure, — that charming surrender for the moment of themselves and whatever belongs to them, so that they make a part of one's own life that can never be forgotten.

The more one lives out of doors the more personality there seems to be in what we call inanimate things. The strength of the hills and the voice of the waves are no longer only grand poetical sentences, but an expression of something real, and more and more one finds God himself in the world, and believes that we may read the thoughts that He writes for us in the book of Nature.

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.

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

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

Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading.

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