Sarah Orne Jewett > Quotes

“Find your quiet center of life and write from that to the world.”
― 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

“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, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories

“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

“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, The Country of the Pointed Firs

“Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading.”
― 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, A Country Doctor

“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, A Country Doctor

“What has made this nation great? Not its heroes but its households.”
― 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, The Country of the Pointed Firs

“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, The Country of the Pointed Firs

“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, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories

“There's more women likes to be loved than there is of those that loves.”
― 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, A Country Doctor

“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, A Country Doctor

“When I went in again the little house had suddenly grown lonely, and my room looked empty as it had the day I came. I and all my belongings had died out of it, and I knew how it would seem when Mrs. Todd came back and found her lodger gone. So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.”
― Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories

“be brisk, be splendid, and be public.”
― Sarah Orne Jewett, Martha's Lady

“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

“So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.”
― Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs

“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, The Country of the Pointed Firs

“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, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories

“When one really knows a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming acquainted with a single person. 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, The Country of the Pointed Firs

“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

“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, A White Heron and Other Stories

“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, Novels and Stories: Deephaven / A Country Doctor / The Country of the Pointed Firs / Dunnet Landing Stories / Selected Stories and Sketches

“I took new pleasure in the thought that in a piece of wild pasture land like this one may get closest to Nature, and subsist upon what she gives of her own free will. There have been no drudging, heavy-shod ploughmen to overturn the soil, and vex it into yielding artificial crops. Here one has to take just what Nature is pleased to give, whether one is a yellow-bird or a human being.”
― Sarah Orne Jewett, A White Heron and Other Stories

“There's sometimes a good hearty tree growin' right out of the bare rock, out o' some crack that just holds the roots', she went on to say, 'right on the pitch o' one o' them bare stony hills where you can't seem to see a wheelbarrowful o' good earth in a place, but that tree'll keep a green top in the driest summer. You lay your ear down to the ground an' you'll hear a little stream runnin'. Every such tree has got its own livin' spring; there's folks made to match 'em.”
― Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs

“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, A Country Doctor

“Conformity is the inspiration of much second-rate virtue.”
― Sarah Orne Jewett, A Country Doctor

“The bright flower was like a face. Somehow, the beauty and life of it were surprising in the plain room, like a gay little child who might suddenly appear in a doorway.”
― Sarah Orne Jewett, The Only Rose