Quotes from Thomas Tryon

It is not easy to learn much about love, but one thing I discovered, that Lady Harleigh taught me: it is not whom you love that is important, but only that we love.

You can't negate the ingrained imagination of a whole culture.

I wish I could help," he murmured, with a turn to the Victrola handle. "We help one another by understanding one another: that is the only help there is.

Nothin' wrong with sentiment, if it's what you truly feel. That's the trouble with folks, they're afraid to show what's inside 'em.

A woman always thinks it takes two to keep a secret, but I'm here to say I think it takes one.

It is like a deep pool, this imagination, and during the day it gets used up, like water, and when we sleep at night the water we have used during the day gets replaced. And if it is not replaced, if there is none to drink of, we are thirsty. It is from sleep that God gives us our strength and our power and our peace, do you see.

We help one another by understanding one another. That is the only help there is. And the only hope as well.

I AWAKENED THAT MORNING to birdsong. It was only the little yellow bird who lives in the locust tree outside our bedroom window, but I could have wrung his neck, for it was not yet six and I had a hangover.

The house, though new to us when we purchased it in the spring, was almost three hundred years old, an uninhabited wreck we had chanced upon,

The Bible says Eve was born of Adam's rib, but he was born of the earth, so there was woman before there ever was man. She is not merely a mate, a life's companion, a helpmeet; she is the moving force, the power.

But we shook hands", I told her fiercely. "He forgave me - I know he did." "It's easy for the dead to forgive", she said, equally fierce. "But it's the living you've got to ask it of.

He drifted, dreamed; and dreamed some more.

She seemed less my wife and more a woman in her own right, more self-reliant and independent. I felt I was looking at her in the round, so to speak, as one views a statue, from all sides, not merely a bas-relief with the figure partially imprisoned in the stone.

Her mirror was her only intimate, and she wanted its reflection to be the single most important statement she cared to make.

greeting the Reverend, who was once again meek, as though this very day he might inherit the earth.

What was here yesterday would be here tomorrow, and if it wasn't it was no great matter. What mattered was the earth and what it could provide.

I AWAKENED THAT MORNING to birdsong. It was only the little yellow bird who lives in the locust tree outside our bedroom window,

Viewed in the light of what occurred later, it was a fool's paradise, but I could not have known that then. Fool's paradise in those weeks was still Heart's Desire, and it seemed nothing could possible happen to spoil the idyll of our new existence. Above all, and very real, was a profound sense of belonging not only to my family but tot he villagers, to the countryside, and , though I did not till it, to the land.

This atrocious child, whom even now she loved.

she rose and drifted about the room at length, clasping and unclasping her hands, pressing them to her temples as if she would seal in certain broodings which lay hidden there.

In Harvest-time, harvest folk servants and all, Should make all together good cheer in the hall, And fill the black bowl Of blyth to their song, And let them be merry, all harvest-time long. THOMAS TUSSER Elizabethan farmer-poet

There's things in a woman a man may never understand.

The shocked gloomy aftermath of death pressed a heavy hand upon the house.

His heart's in the right place, but his tongue's an affliction.