Quotes from Elizabeth Yates

When something wonderful happens...it is to be cherished in the heart and in the mind. We must not be afraid of the wonderful things, nor must we let others laugh them away from us. Only thus do we learn how to hold our dreams.

some things are too wonderful even for a child, and freedom's one of them

Once, long years ago, I thought I could set a canoe-load of my people free by breaking the bands at my wrists and killing the white man who held the weapon. I had the strength in my hands to do such a deed and I had the fire within, but I didn't do it." "What held you back?" Amos shook his head. "My hand was restrained and I'm glad that it was, for the years between have shown me that it does a man no good to be free until he knows how to live, how to walk in step with God.

He said little about his dream but he nourished it in his heart as the best place for a dream to grow.

What right had she to oppose him? Yet it was he who had given her freedom. The word was meaningless unless in its light each one lived up to his highest and his best.

But even while Lily was his wife, Amos thought of Ath-mun - now only a faint frail part of memory but still dear. He hoped that in making one black woman free he had made Ath-mun free if she was in need of freedom.

Once it was his hard-earned money that had been used to buy her freedom. How could she speak against his doing something with what was his for another in need?

Martha looked at her son. So this was the beginning of growing up. This was where the road they had been traveling together first parted.

Benj had once said, "A man must have a care to what he puts in his mind, for when he's alone on a hillside and draws it out he'll want treasures to be his company, not regrets.

Samuel George looked closely at the freed Negro facing him and he thought that though the man had the look of being familiar with time he bore none of the marks that time could leave. He was well built and well muscled, carrying his head high. There was gray in his hair, but his face was furrowed more by laughter than by years.

Loveliest of any blossoming thing to her was that green stalk with its white bells. White was the most beautiful color she knew. Yet when she would say that to Amos he would remind her that the brown of the earth from which the flowers came was a good color too.

Always she thought of him as climbing some mountain in his mind, like that great one to the west on which his eyes would dwell so often and from which he seemed to derive something that was even more than strength.

for Africa was in a way none of them could explain linked up with heaven and they thought of the two places with the same reverence and ultimate longing.

There's a fire that burns fast the more fuel goes on it and that's shiftlessness," Violet said stoutly. "Lois is a shiftless woman and money is just so much fuel to her fire.

The At-mun-shi were as pagan as all the tribes in Africa, but they were peaceable and they were, as well, intense in their love of freedom.

Once I thought forgiveness was great, now I see repentance to be even greater for it is life-giving. These United States are strong because they have the capacity to see and correct mistakes, to change and grow.

The long, slow, sweet summer that had filled us with peace was drawing to a close. The breezes might still blow warm, but around the edges of our world was a "last-time" feeling. This special kind of loveliness, these rich offerings of pasture and wood lot could not go on forever. I wanted to tuck it all inside me--the wonder of it and our own deep delight--so it would last through the winter and until the year turned again to spring.

He smiled, that gay clean smile of his that I knew so well and that had so often been like a light to me. For one of those brief magic moments of time the years slipped away, and I was back in the tiny old cottage in Sussex that a friend had loaned to us for a few days. It was our wedding night and Bill was saying, "All of me to you, darling, forever." Yes, that was it: all of each of us to the other. Forever. Whatever.

There are many things in the world. If we care for them all a little, we won't feel the hurt too much when we part with one.

Never is a long time...and none of us lives to see its length.

T)he only way we can prove ourselves worthy of a big trust is by doing well the tasks that belong to each day.

Sometimes there aren't any buts...If we accept what is our life, we grow through it and because of it. That's the way we grow up.

Did you ever think...that a seed can't start reaching up to the sun until something in it has gone down first into the earth?...I'm not sure that a man can go far if he hasn't first learned to bow before something bigger than he is.

We never know how strong a beam a candle has until we try it in the dark.