Mary Webb > Quotes

“We are tomorrow's past.”
― Mary Webb

“He was ever a strong man, which is almost the same, times, as to say a man with little time for kindness. For if you stop to be kind, you must swerve often from your pat. So when folk tell me of this great man and that great man, I think to myself, Who was stinted of joy for his glory? How many old folk and children did his coach wheels go over? What bridal lacked his song, and what mourner his tars, that he found time to climb so high?”
― Mary Webb, Precious Bane

“[...]we are all as full of echoes as a rocky wood--echoes of the past, reflex echoes of the future, and echoes of the soil (these last reverberating through our filmiest dreams, like the sound of thunder in a blossoming orchard).”
― Mary Webb, Gone to Earth

“I've thought since that when folk grumble about this and that and be not happy, it is not the fault of creation, that is like a vast mere full of good, but it is the fault of their bucket's smallness.”
― Mary Webb, Precious Bane

“She had so deep a kinship with the trees, so intuitive a sympathy with leaf and flower, that it seemed as if the blood in her veins was not slow-moving human blood, but volatile sap.”
― Mary Webb, Gone to Earth

“That vivid present of theirs, how faint it grows! The past is only the present become invisible and mute, and because it is invisible and mute, its memoried glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are to-morrow's past.”
― Mary Webb, Precious Bane

“You wasn't made like watch-dogs and house-cats and cows. You was made a fox, and you be a fox, and its queer-like to me, Foxy, as folk canna see that. They expect you to be what you wanna made to be. You'm made to be a fox; and when you'm busy being a fox they say you'm a sinner!”
― Mary Webb, Gone to Earth

“I'd laboured over it a long while, and labour brings a thing near the heart's core.”
― Mary Webb, Precious Bane

“We are tomorrow's past. Even now we slip away like those pictures painted on the moving dials of antique clocks - a ship, a cottage, sun and moon, a nosegay. The dial turns, the ship rides up and sinks again, the yellow painted sun has set, and we, that were the new thing, gather magic as we go. The whirr of the spinning wheels has ceased in our parlours, and we hear no more the treadles of the loom, the swift, silken noise of the flung shuttle, the intermittent thud of the batten. But the imagination hears them, and theirs is the melody of romance." ~ from Mary Webb's introduction to her novel Precious Bane.”
― Mary Webb

“The past is only the present become invisible and mute; its memoried glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious.”
― Mary Webb

“What did I do, I, that knew his smile was my summer?”
― Mary Webb, Precious Bane

“Tomorrow is a word of hope,I do believe !”
― Mary Webb

“There are misfortunes that make you spring up and rush to save yourself, but, there are others that are too bad for this, for they leave nought to do. Then a stillness falls on the soul, like the stillness of a rabbit when the stoat looks hotly upon it and it knows that there is no more to be done.”
― Mary Webb, Precious Bane

“Not only had he looked at me, but he had looked with favour and longing, and though I knew it was only because the truth was hidden from him, yet I was glad of what I had, as a winter bird is, that will come to your hand for a little crumb, though in plenteous times she would but mock you from the topmost bough.”
― Mary Webb, Precious Bane

“Era un uomo forte, il che a volte equivale a dire un uomo poco incline alla bontà, perché per essere buoni spesso bisogna allontanarsi dalla propria strada. Infatti, quando la gente mi parla di questo o di quel grand'uomo, io penso subito: “Se ha trovato il tempo per arrivare così in alto, a chi sarà stata sottratta la gioia per la sua gloria? Su quanti vecchi e su quanti bambini sono passate le ruote del suo carro? A quali nozze non è andato, a quali funerali non ha pianto, per trovare il tempo di arrivare tanto in alto?”
― Mary Webb

“Mi piaceva osservare la pasta che lievitava al calore della fiamma, e scaldare il forno con le fascine, raccattandone poi la cenere, e allineare per bene le pagnottine. Era piacevole stare nella cucina calda e piena di luce, in cui si diffondeva il buon odore del pane, e guardare fuori i campi e i boschi grigi, freddi e solitari, e poi chiudere le imposte, accendere la candela, apparecchiare e mettere a scaldare la focaccia di patate sulla brace, e sapere anche che di lì a poco tutti quelli che amavo sarebbero stati al riparo per una notte intera.”
― Mary Webb, Precious Bane

“Sleep was her fetish, panacea and art.”
― Mary Webb, Gone to Earth

“Perché io credo che l'anima agisca sul corpo, che lo vivifichi col suo soffio e lo ricopra di un velo che lo fa sembrare più bello di quanto non sia.”
― Mary Webb, Precious Bane

“She was a being who needed joy. Having joy, she could triumph over the most desperate physical ills. But when joy flickered and went out, then she remembered the grave. Now, as she went softly over the bridge and began to climb the woods, joy seemed fled forever.

“She looked round her in a kind of terror, for she had come to the moment, which all sensitive people must reach at some time, when the soul perceives simultaneously the life of man—its small comforts, its upholstery of everyday—and the infinite; when it asks, bemused and anxious, ‘Which is the dream?’ They cannot both be true, it seems, for they are in flat contradiction. Yet daily life is true. There it is, with its duties and meals and wordy meetings; with its sweetness of affectionate glances and homely jests. That is no dream. Yet, when the beloved is dead, the daily life shrinks and withers; the infinite presses in. There it is, with all its indifferent stars, fearfully real, utterly unknown. With this intrusion of the infinite there come all the strange instincts of the spirit that have no part in daily life. These also are no dream. So there the soul stands, browbeaten and stunned by antithesis, murmuring, ‘Which is true? Is anything true?”
― Mary Webb, The House in Dormer Forest

“When you've come through a bad time, to tell of it takes the thorn out.”
― Mary Webb, Precious Bane

“Green is the fresh emblem of well founded hopes. In blue the spirit can wander, but in green it can rest.”
― Mary Webb