Sarah Orne Jewett Quotes

We are more likely to busy ourselves with finding things to do than in doing with our might the work that is in our hands already.

It is not one’s surroundings that can help or hinder – it is having a growing purpose in one’s life to make the most of whatever is in one’s reach. If you have but a few good books, learn those to the very heart of them. Don’t for one moment believe that if you had different surroundings and opportunities you would find the upward path any easier to climb. One condition is like another, if you have not the determination and the power to grow in yourself.

If clergymen knew their congregations as well as physicians do, the sermons would be often more closely related to the parish needs.

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

Being furnished not only with a subject of conversation, but with a safe refuge in the kitchen in case of incompatibility, Mrs. Fosdick and I sat down, prepared to make the best of each other.

tain't so pleasant as when poor dear was here. Oh, I didn't want to lose her an' she didn't want to go, but it had to be. Such things ain't for us to say; there's no yes an' no to it.

T’aint’ no use to look for public sperit ‘less you’ve got some yourself.

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

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 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.

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

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

Captain Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading.

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.

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.