Sarah Orne Jewett Quotes & Sayings

My friends plunged into a borderless sea of reminiscences and personal news. — Sarah Orne Jewett

The road was new to me, as roads always are, going back. — Sarah Orne Jewett

Some set more by such things as come from a distance, but I rec'lect mother always used to maintain that folks was meant to be doctored with the stuff that grew right about 'em. — Sarah Orne Jewett

I now remembered that Mrs. Todd had told me one day that Captain Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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 ... — Sarah Orne Jewett

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

Tain't worthwhile to wear a day all out before it comes. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

The mysterious moment of death proves to be a moment of waking. How one longs to take it for one's self! — Sarah Orne Jewett

Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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

It seemed sometimes as if love and hate and jealousy and adverse winds at sea might also find their proper remedies among the curious wild-looking plants in Mrs. Todd's garden. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am. — Sarah Orne Jewett

Love isn't blind; it's only love that sees! — Sarah Orne Jewett

Find your quiet center of life and write from that to the world. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

What has made this nation great? Not its heroes but its households. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

The warm sun kissed the earthTo consecrate thy birth,And from his close embraceThy radiant faceSprang into sight,A blossoming delight. — Sarah Orne Jewett

Look bravely up into the sky,
And be content with knowing
That God wished for a buttercup
Just here, where you are growing. — Sarah Orne Jewett

Imagination is the only true thing in the world! — Sarah Orne Jewett

Wrecked on the lee shore of age. — Sarah Orne Jewett

It is the people who can do nothing who find nothing to do, and the secret to happiness in this world is not only to be useful, but to be forever elevating one's uses. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

God would not give us the same talent if what were right for men were wrong for women. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

In the life of each of us there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

This is a very small world; we are all within hail of each other. I dare say when we get to Heaven there will not be a stranger to make friends with. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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

A lean sorrow is hardest to bear. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

This was one of those perfect New England days in late summer where the spirit of autumn takes a first stealing flight, like a spy, through the ripening country-side, and, with feigned sympathy for those who droop with August heat, puts her cool cloak of bracing air about leaf and flower and human shoulders. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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 overWill find the four-leaved clover. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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

You never get over bein' a child long's you have a mother to go to. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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

It seems to me like stealing, for men and women to live in the world and do nothing to make it better. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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? — Sarah Orne Jewett

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

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

It is a splendid thing to have the use of any gift of God. It isn't for us to choose again, or wonder and dispute, but just work in our own places, and leave the rest to God. — Sarah Orne Jewett

be brisk, be splendid, and be public. — Sarah Orne Jewett

My dear father; my dear friend; the best and wisest man I ever knew, who taught me many lessons and showed me many things as we went together along the country by-ways. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

You must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world that holds offices, and all society ... In short, 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; sentiment falls to sentimentality - you can write about life, but never write life itself ... To work in silence and with all one's heart, that is the writer's lot; he is the only artist who must be a solitary, and yet needs the widest outlook upon the world. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

We are always looking forward to the passing and ending of winter, but when summer is here it seems as if summer must always last. As I went across the fields that day, I found myself half lamenting that the world must fade again, even that the best of her budding and bloom was only a preparation for another spring-time, for an awakening beyond the coming winter's sleep. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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

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. — Sarah Orne Jewett

There, don't you think I'm always a-fault-finding! When I get hold of the real thing in folks, I stick to 'em, - but there's an awful sight of poor material walking about that ain't worth the ground it steps on. — Sarah Orne Jewett

It was mortifying to find how strong the habit of idle speech may become in one's self. One need not always be saying something in this noisy world. — Sarah Orne Jewett

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

The old poets little knew what comfort they could be to a man. — Sarah Orne Jewett

A harbor, even if it is a little harbor, is a good thing, since adventurers come into it as well as go out, and the life in it grows strong, because it takes something from the world, and has something to give in return. — Sarah Orne Jewett