New Hampshire Quotes

“I was once reproved by a minister who was driving a poor beast to some meeting-house horse-sheds among the hills of New Hampshire, because I was bending my steps to a mountain-top on the Sabbath, instead of a church, when I would have gone farther than he to hear a true word spoken on that or any day. He declared that I was 'breaking the Lord's fourth commandment,' and proceeded to enumerate, in a sepulchral tone, the disasters which had befallen him whenever he had done any ordinary work on the Sabbath. He really thought that a god was on the watch to trip up those men who followed any secular work on this day, and did not see that it was the evil conscience of the workers that did it. The country is full of this superstition, so that when one enters a village, the church, not only really but from association, is the ugliest looking building in it, because it is the one in which human nature stoops the lowest and is most disgraced. Certainly, such temples as these shall erelong cease to deform the landscape. There are few things more disheartening and disgusting than when you are walking the streets of a strange village on the Sabbath, to hear a preacher shouting like a boatswain in a gale of wind, and thus harshly profaning the quiet atmosphere of the day.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“Did you know that New Hampshire has more hamsters per capita than any other state?”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, All In

“Live Free or Die; Death is Not the Worst of Evils.”
― John Stark

“Mrs. Clinton, speaking to a black church audience on Martin Luther King Day last year, did describe President George W. Bush as treating the Congress of the United States like 'a plantation,' adding in a significant tone of voice that 'you know what I mean ...'

She did not repeat this trope, for some reason, when addressing the electors of Iowa or New Hampshire. She's willing to ring the other bell, though, if it suits her. But when an actual African-American challenger comes along, she rather tends to pout and wince at his presumption (or did until recently).”
― Christopher Hitchens

“During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of that back, whereas if you look up what most of my profession was then writing about the beefy, unscrupulous 'New Democrat,' you will be astonished at the quantity of sheer saccharine and drool. Anyway, I kept on about it even after most Republicans had consulted the opinion polls and decided it was a losing proposition, and if you look up the transcript of the eventual Senate trial of the president—only the second impeachment hearing in American history—you will see that the last order of business is a request (voted down) by the Senate majority leader to call Carol and me as witnesses. So I can dare to say that at least I saw it through.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Yet isn't it all—all of it, every single episode and detail of the Clinton saga—exactly like that? And isn't some of it a little bit more serious? For Sen. Clinton, something is true if it validates the myth of her striving and her 'greatness' (her overweening ambition in other words) and only ceases to be true when it no longer serves that limitless purpose. And we are all supposed to applaud the skill and the bare-faced bravado with which this is done. In the New Hampshire primary in 1992, she knowingly lied about her husband's uncontainable sex life and put him eternally in her debt. This is now thought of, and referred to in print, purely as a smart move on her part. In the Iowa caucuses of 2008, he returns the favor by telling a huge lie about his own record on the war in Iraq, falsely asserting that he was opposed to the intervention from the very start. This is thought of, and referred to in print, as purely a tactical mistake on his part: trying too hard to help the spouse. The happy couple has now united on an equally mendacious account of what they thought about Iraq and when they thought it. What would it take to break this cheap little spell and make us wake up and inquire what on earth we are doing when we make the Clinton family drama—yet again—a central part of our own politics?”
― Christopher Hitchens

“All the time we were there, you could see that dead squirrel right out in plain sight. Whenever anyone mentions New Hampshire, that squirrel is always what I think of. I bet I’ve thought about that squirrel a million times.”
― Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True

“The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black-and-white landscape.

("The Triumph Of The Night")”
― Edith Wharton, The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton

“The four libertarians who came to New Hampshire had thinner wallets than…other would-be utopians, but they had a new angle they believed would help them move the Free Town Project out of the realm of marijuana-hazed reveries and into reality. Instead of building from scratch, they would harness the power and infrastructure of an existing town—just as a rabies parasite can co-opt the brain of a much larger organism and force it work against its own interests, the libertarians planned to apply just a bit of pressure in such a way that an entire town could be steered toward liberty.”
― Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, A Libertarian Walks into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town

“Sometimes, the easy thing comes cloaked in the guise of what is right.”
― John Casey

“Mountains are different and unique from anything else you will face in life in that they are the truest, cleanest representative of life’s challenges in physical form. There is no mistaking the end goal, and there is no mistaking who got you there. You have to count on you, and your arrival at the summit is the simplest and most honest achievement for your soul that you can experience.”
― Matt Larson, 4000s by 40: Tackling Middle Age in the Mountains of New Hampshire

“The Resonance of Honeyed Summer
Elizabethan Sonnet Sequence
abab, cdcd, efef, gg

Synchronous in honeyed summer sings a choir of tremulous birch leaves,
A sweet breeze surges south from the mountains to cool down the farm.
To a white picket fence, among the honeybees, a steadfast garden cleaves,
After blind disregard by a town plow, mended again from winter harm.
A sensual scent of new mown meadow, the clash of croquet mallet to ball,
A ricochet sings a tin din of two wickets and a knock into a winning stake.
By the barn, night owls howl, by day gleeful wee hummingbirds enthrall.
The mirth of dipping children as wakes of droning motorboats lap a lake.
Bluebirds have woven a love nest in a stilted, rough-hewn, wooden house.
By a stonewall wild berries grow swollen from green to a misty blue hue.
As we ride bikes beside a hayfield, we rouse the flight of a russet grouse.
At dawn a doe and fawn cross our lawn leaving hoof prints upon the dew.
In long lemonade days, rocking and sipping on the porch, in our defense,
We're in awe of honeyed summertime and the harmony of its resonance.

+ + +”
― David B. Lentz, Sonnets on the Common Man: New Hampshire Verse

“How shall we embrace the common man: give us a reason without a doubt?
Is Everyman fated as an island unto himself ‘til his last bright day goes by?”
― David B. Lentz, Sonnets on the Common Man: New Hampshire Verse

“New England is a dream handspun by good vibes.”
― Lakshya Bharadwaj

“New Hampshire was so often overlooked, overshadowed by the lush rolling hills and earnestly cool vibe of Vermont to its left and the breathtaking beauty of Maine on the right. It was the middle child of New England states; kind of weird, occasionally out of step, often forgotten. And yes, they did not require motorcyclists to wear helmets because of the whole live-free-or-die ethos, which was deeply rooted in every nook and cranny of the place. But to me it was magical; New Hampshire had an old soul. It was simple and complex, stoic and serene, and I felt utterly like myself when I was here.”
― Kate Spencer