Constance Fenimore Woolson Quotes & Sayings

A daughter's love for a kind father ... is mixed with the careless happiness of childhood, which can never come again. Into the father's grave the daughter, sometimes a gray-haired woman, lays away forever the little pet names and memories which to all the rest of the world are but foolishness. — Constance Fenimore Woolson

It is easy to be humble when a greater is preferred; but when an inferior is lifted high above our heads, how can we bear it? — Constance Fenimore Woolson

In tangled wreath, in clustered gleaming stars,
In floating, curling sprays,
The golden flower comes shining though the woods
These February days;
Forth go all hearts, all hands, from out the town,
To bring her gayly in,
This wild, sweet Princess of far Florida -
The yellow jessamine. — Constance Fenimore Woolson

Are we to go out with trumpets and tell everything we know, just because it is true? Is there not such a thing as egotistical truthfulness? — Constance Fenimore Woolson

Warm-heartedness generally begins at home, and those who are warm to others are warmer to themselves; it is but the overflow. — Constance Fenimore Woolson

My only wickedness is that I love you; my only goodness, the same. — Constance Fenimore Woolson

Theories are like scaffolding: they are not the house, but you cannot build the house without them. — Constance Fenimore Woolson

For years of faithfulness even as a child are not thrown away, but yield ... a strength at last in times of trial. — Constance Fenimore Woolson

Time is not so all-erasing as we think. — Constance Fenimore Woolson

If we neglect our privileges, the gods take them from us ... — Constance Fenimore Woolson

They did not realize what a supreme effort of courage it required to make this young girl go out alone into the wide world, and face its vastness and its strangeness. — Constance Fenimore Woolson