Elizabeth Enright > Quotes

“Grownups! Everyone remembers them. How strange and even sad it is that we never became what they were: beings noble, infallible, and free. We never became them. One of the things we discover as we live is that we never become anything different from what we are. We are no less ourselves at forty than we were at four, and because of this we know grownups as Grownups only once in life: during our own childhood. We never meet them in our lives again, and we will miss them always.”
― Elizabeth Enright, Doublefields: Memories and Stories

“Now isn't that nice!' said the old lady. 'If cousins are the right kind, they're best of all: kinder than sisters and brothers, and closer than friends.”
― Elizabeth Enright, Gone-Away Lake

“He couldn't stop smelling the air in great, deep, loud sniffs. It was so delicious. It smelled of water, and mud, and maple trees, and autumn.”
― Elizabeth Enright, The Four-Story Mistake

“October sunshine bathed the park with such a melting light that it had the dimmed impressive look of a landscape by an old master.”
― Elizabeth Enright, The Riddle of the Fly: & Other Stories

“Never plan a picnic' Father said. 'Plan a dinner, yes, or a house, or a budget, or an appointment with the dentist, but never, never plan a picnic.”
― Elizabeth Enright, The Four-Story Mistake

“Maybe we benefit from the providence of others more often than we know.”
― Elizabeth Enright, Gone-Away Lake

“Did you know that a bee dies after he stings you? And that there's a star called Aldebaran? And that around the tenth of August, any year, you can look up in the sky at night and see dozens and dozens of shooting stars?”
― Elizabeth Enright, Then There Were Five

“All over the city lights were coming on in the purple-blue dusk. The street lights looked delicate and frail, as though they might suddenly float away from their lampposts like balloons. Long twirling ribbons of light, red, green, violet, were festooned about the doorways of drugstores and restaurants--and the famous electric signs of Broadway had come to life with glittering fish, dancing figures, and leaping fountains, all flashing like fire. Everything was beautiful. Up in the deepening sky above the city the first stars appeared white and rare as diamonds.”
― Elizabeth Enright, The Saturdays

“Self-pity is the hens' besetting sin," remarked Mr. Payton. "Foolish fowl. How they came to achieve anything as perfect as the egg I do not know! I cannot fathom.”
― Elizabeth Enright, Gone-Away Lake

“Someday she planned to paint he ceiling: Blue, with gold stars on it, whole constellations, and a section of the Milky Way.”
― Elizabeth Enright, The Four-Story Mistake

“Each day the sun shone, the birds lingered, though the trees were turning, purely out of habit, and their rose and yellow and rust looked strange and beautiful above the brilliant green grass.”
― Elizabeth Enright, The Four-Story Mistake

“The mullein had finished blooming, and stood up out of the pastures like dusty candelabra. The flowers of Queen Anne's lace had curled up into birds' nests, and the bee balm was covered with little crown-shaped pods. In another month -- no, two, maybe -- would come the season of the skeletons, when all that was left of the weeds was their brittle architecture. But the time was not yet. The air was warm and bright, the grass was green, and the leaves, and the lazy monarch butterflies were everywhere.”
― Elizabeth Enright

“Already he knew that to overdo a thing is to destroy it.”
― elizabeth enright, The Four-Story Mistake

“Like ghosts the children walked across the lawn on their bare feet. The moon was full. Above the damp grass hung a veil of mist, luminous with moonlight and spangled with fireflies. There was no wind, and the sound of the brook was very distinct, tinkling, splashing, running softly. It made Mona think of an ancient fountain, shaped like a shell, covered with moss, and set in a secluded garden. Something she half remembered, or imagined.”
― Elizabeth Enright, The Four-Story Mistake

“Summer was over in twenty minutes that day. Finished. At four o'clock in the afternoon the roses were quiet on their stems, full-blown, fulfilled; the water in the pool was warm; the leaves on the trees quiet, too, and green. The cat lay with his belly to the sun, steeped in heat.”
― Elizabeth Enright, Doublefields: Memories and Stories

“Each golden day was cherished to the full, for one had the feeling that each must be the last. Tomorrow it would be winter.”
― Elizabeth Enright, The Four-Story Mistake

“No matter how old a person gets, he's never old in spring!”
― Elizabeth Enright, Return to Gone-Away

“The summer,' Randy explained. 'I'm going to appreciate it. I'm going to walk in the woods noticing everything, and ride my bike on all the roads I never explored. I'm going to fill a pillow with ladies' tobacco so I can smell it in January and remember about August. I'm going to dry a big bunch of pennyroyal so I can break pieces off all winter and think of summer. I'm going to look at everything, and smell everything, and listen to everything so I'll never forget --”
― Elizabeth Enright, Then There Were Five

“This was the hour she loved; this lonely hour when the others were distant in sleep and she was alone in the house; when she could cry if she wanted to, or curse, or sit at her work and think or remember and no longer be anything but herself. There is a latitude to late night, when one's thoughts dare to travel, and the emotions are free, no longer frightened by confinement.”
― Elizabeth Enright, Borrowed Summer

“Mr. Payton was at work on his pipe again, lighting and coaxing it. "They need constant attention, pipes, like babies and guinea hens," he said, and sucked in the smoke.”
― Elizabeth Enright, Gone-Away Lake

“This silence was woven of many sounds: of long soft owl calls, of tree frogs’ voices, of invisible wings fluttering past a window, and above all the delicate, ceaseless breathing of the woods.”
― Elizabeth Enright, Then There Were Five

“I thought of many an autumn I had known: Seemly autumns approaching deliberately, with amplitude. I thought of wild asters, Michaelmas daisies, mushrooms, leaves idling down the air, two or three at a time, warblers twittering and glittering in every bush ('Confusing fall warblers,' Peterson calls them, and how right he is): the lingering yellow jackets feeding on broken apples; crickets; amber-dappled light; great geese barking down from the north; the seesaw noise that blue jays seem to make more often in the fall. Hoarfrost in the morning, cold stars at night. But slow; the whole thing coming slowly. The way it should be.”
― Elizabeth Enright, Doublefields: Memories and Stories

“By lunchtime the valley was lightly coated, like a cake with confectioner's sugar...there was white fur on the antlers of the iron deer and on the melancholy boughs of the Norway spruce.”
― Elizabeth Enright, The Four-Story Mistake

“In the deep sky where there had been a sun, we saw a ring of white silver; a smoking ring, and all the smokes were silver, too; gauzy, fuming, curling, unbelievable. And who had ever seen the sky this color! Not in the earliest morning or at twilight, never before had we seen or dreamed this strange immortal blue in which a few large stars now sparkled as though for the first time in creation.”
― Elizabeth Enright, Doublefields: Memories and Stories

“Good things must have comparers, I suppose,' said Portia, 'Or how would we knowhow good they are?”
― Elizabeth Enright

“Garnet woke up early. Before she was quite wide awake she lay with her eyes closed, half afraid to look for fear it might be raining. But even with them closed she knew it was going to be all right because the color behind her lids was clear and rosy and she knew the sunlight lay upon them. And she heard crickets in the meadow, and a fly buzzing against the screen, and somebody whistling outside. So it was all right and she opened her eyes. Oh what a day! She held up her arm in the sunlight; all the little hairs on it glittered like fine gold, and her closed fingers were ember-colored as if there were a light inside them.”
― Elizabeth Enright, Thimble Summer

“Mrs. Cheever's kitchen was calm and cool. Mr. Payton, in a chair by the window, was reading a very old newspaper. "Old news is more soothing to read about," he said. "You know that you have lived through it alright.”
― Elizabeth Enright, Gone-Away Lake

“The dishes," [Garnet] said. "Oh, let them stand for once!" cried Mrs. Linden grandly, "we can do them when we come home. This is an important day."

"You're nice," said Garnet, and gave her mother a hug.”
― Elizabeth Enright, Thimble Summer

“I loved the flash of jewels and the luster of satin. In those days women dressed.”
― Elizabeth Enright, Doublefields: Memories and Stories

“Garnet was very happy. She was so happy, for no especial reason, that she felt as if she must move carefully so she wouldn't jar or shake the feeling of happiness.”
― Elizabeth Enright, Thimble Summer