Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward > Quotes

“Success for a woman means absolute surrender, in whatever direction. Whether she paints a picture, or loves a man, there is no division of labor possible in her economy. To the attainment of any end worth living for, a symmetrical sacrifice of her nature is compulsory upon her.”
― Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Story of Avis

“They don't take the Bible as a general thing, sailors don't; though I will say that I never saw the man at sea who didn't give it the credit of being an uncommon good yarn.

("Kentucky's Ghost")”
― Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Terror by Gaslight: More Victorian Tales of Terror

“My wife and I said good-bye the next morning in a little sheltered place among the lumber on the wharf; she was one of your women who never like to do their crying before folks.

She climbed on the pile of lumber and sat down, a little flushed and quivery, to watch us off. I remember seeing her there with the baby till we were well down the channel. I remember noticing the bay as it grew cleaner, and thinking that I would break off swearing; and I remember cursing Bob Smart like a pirate within an hour.

("Kentucky's Ghost")”
― Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Terror by Gaslight: More Victorian Tales of Terror

“I shall miss you,' said Perley. 'Of course I shall miss you, Maverick. So should I miss the piano, if it were taken out of the parlor.”
― Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Silent Partner: Including "The Tenth of January"

“...[F]or to love and to be separated is misery, and Heaven is joy.”
― Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar or Our Loved Ones in Heaven

“It is not the straining for great things that is most effective, it is the doing the little things, the common duties, a little better and better.”
― Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

“I laid my head upon her shoulder, and could hardly speak for the comfort that she gave me.”
― Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar or Our Loved Ones in Heaven

“A certain indefinable humanness softens his eyes and tones, and seems to be creeping into everything that he says.”
― Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar or Our Loved Ones in Heaven

“I begged her not to leave me. I begged her to stay and help me bear my life.”
― Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar or Our Loved Ones in Heaven

“The last pain borne, the last tear, the last sigh, the last lonely hour, the last unsatisfied dream, forever gone by; why should not the dead past bury its dead?”
― Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar or Our Loved Ones in Heaven

“How very still you sit!”
― Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Since I Died

“...[F]or the sullenness left his face, and his eyes--which are pleasant, and not unmanly, when one fairly sees them-- sparkled softly, like a child's.”
― Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar or Our Loved Ones in Heaven

“Eternity will never become monotonous.”
― Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar or Our Loved Ones in Heaven

“He forgot that anybody was there, and, sobbing, hid his face in his great hands.”
― Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar or Our Loved Ones in Heaven

“The mystery of the Bible lies not so much in what it says, as in what it does not say.”
― Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar or Our Loved Ones in Heaven

“...[F]orgetfulness of the disagreeable things of this life implies forgetfulness of the pleasant ones. They are all tangled together.”
― Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar or Our Loved Ones in Heaven

“Aunt Winifred says that our hymns, taken all together, contain the worst and the best pictures of heaven that we have in any branch of literature.”
― Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar or Our Loved Ones in Heaven

“He was once an abstract Grandeur which I struggled more in fear than love to please. He has become a living Presence, dear and real”
― Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar or Our Loved Ones in Heaven

“Being only out of sight, you remember, not lost, nor asleep, nor annihilated, he goes on loving. To love must mean to think of, to care for, to hope for, to pray for, not less out of a body than it.”
― Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar or Our Loved Ones in Heaven

“I had a vague, unreasoning feeling that she would take away some of the bitterness of it, as she has taken the bitterness of much else.”
― Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar or Our Loved Ones in Heaven

“He believed, you know, that it takes a material body, a spiritual body, and a soul, to make a man. Death is simply the slipping off of the outer body, as a husk slips off from its kernel. The deathless frame stands ready then for the soul's untrammeled occupation.”
― Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar or Our Loved Ones in Heaven