Sarah Orne Jewett Quotes

I've found that people who look at things as they are, and not as they wish them to be, are the ones who succeed.

This was one of those perfect New England days in late summer where the spirit of autumn takes a first stealing flight, like a spy, through the ripening country-side, and, with feigned sympathy for those who droop with August heat, puts her cool cloak of bracing air about leaf and flower and human shoulders.

It seems to me like stealing, for men and women to live in the world and do nothing to make it better.

You must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.

Do not hurry too fast in these early winter days, - a quiet hour is worth more to you than anything you can do in it.

My childhood is very vivid to me, and I don't feel very different now from the way I felt then. It would appear I am the very same person, only with wrinkles.

A harbor, even if it is a little harbor, is a good thing, since adventurers come into it as well as go out, and the life in it grows strong, because it takes something from the world, and has something to give in return.

The growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.

Love isn't blind; it's only love that sees!

Imagination is the only true thing in the world!

A story should be managed so that it should suggest interesting things to the reader instead of the author's doing all the thinking for him, and setting it before him in black and white.

In the life of each of us there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness.

Tact is after all a kind of mind reading.

It is the people who can do nothing who find nothing to do, and the secret to happiness in this world is not only to be useful, but to be forever elevating one's uses.

It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance who knows what you know. I see so many new folks nowadays who seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation has got to have some root in the past, or else you have got to explain every remark you make, and it wears a person out.

Write it as it is, don't try to make it like this or that. You can't do it in anybody else's way-you will have to make a way of your own.

Look bravely up into the sky, And be content with knowing That God wished for a buttercup Just here, where you are growing.

What's everybody's business is nobody's business.

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.

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.

Yes'm, old friends is always best, 'less you can catch a new one that's fit to make an old one out of.

Who was it said that you never get to a place until a day after you come, nor leave it until a day after you go?

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.

When she walked...she stretched out long and thin like a little tiger, and held her head high to look over the grass as if she were treading the jungle.

It is only unimaginative persons who can be really astonished. The imagination can always outrun the possible and actual sights and sounds of the world.