Quotes from Dorothy Canfield Fisher

I'm as fixed in my opinion as the man who thought he was a hard-boiled egg.

A mom isn't an individual to lean on, but a person to generate leaning needless.

Taking somebody's sacrifices is like taking counterfeit money. You're only the poorer.

There is no human relationship more intimate than that of nurse and patient, one in which the essentials of character are more rawly revealed.

there are two ways to meet life; you may refuse to care until indifference becomes a habit, a defensive armor, and you are safe - but bored. Or you can care greatly, live greatly, until life breaks you on its wheel.

It is not good for all our wishes to be filled; through sickness we recognize the value of health; through evil, the value of good; through hunger, the value of food; through exertion, the value of rest.

If we would give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks' vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.

How he loathed his life-long slavery to the clock, that pervasive intimate negative opposed to every spontaneous impulse. "It's the clock that is the nay-sayer to life," he thought

If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two week's vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.

Anybody who knows anything knows how delicate and exacting a matter it is to try to tune in harmony two human beings, almost constitutionally out of tune even with themselves, full of strange complicated weaknesses and unexpected beauties and strength. Add to that the element of children, each of whom brings a full equipment of strange unexplored possiblities, and any fool can see that no outside complications are needed to make the problem a difficult one. "Marital Relations

It wasn't because Eva had not tried her best. She had nearly killed herself trying. But she had been like a gifted mathematician set to paint a picture.

I declare! Sometimes it seems to me that every time a new piece of machinery comes into the door some of our wits fly out the window!

Eva had passionate love and devotion to give them, but neither patience nor understanding. There was no sacrifice in the world which she would not joyfully make for her children except to live with them.

Not a thing had happened the way she had planned, no, not a single thing! But it seemed to her she had never been so happy in her life.

I never did,' said the little girl, but in a less doubtful tone than she had ever used with that phrase so familiar to her. A dim notion was growing in her mind that the fact that she had never done a thing was no proof that she couldn't.

The minute your group gets so big you don't know anybody in it and they don't know you, there's hell to pay.

P)ersonality...is perhaps the very most important thing in the world. Yet we know only one or two things about it. We know that anybody's personality is made up of the sum total of all the actions and thoughts and desires of his life. And we know that though there aren't any words or any figures in any languages to set down that sum total accurately, still it is one of the first things that everybody knows about anybody else. And that really is all we know!

The matter was that never before had she known what she was doing in school. She had always thought she was there to pass from one grade to another, and she was ever so startled to get a glimpse of the fact that she was there to learn how to read and write and cipher and generally use her mind, so she could take care of herself when she came to be grown up.

That room was full to the brim of something beautiful,...Its name was Happiness.

What a ghastly thing to have sensitive, helpless human beings absolutely in the power of other human beings! Absolute, unquestioned power! Nobody can stand that. It's cold poison. How many wardens of prisons are driven sadistically mad with it!

Live while you can live, then die and be done with it.

YOU aren't any grade at all, no matter where you are in school. You're just yourself, aren't you? What difference does it make what grade you're in? And what's the use of your reading little baby things too easy for you just because you don't know your multiplication table?

liberty means the only lasting road to order and discipline and self-control. Once again, for the thousandth time, people needed to be reminded that the reign of the tyrant who imposes laws on human souls from the outside (even though that tyrant intends nothing but the best for his subjects and be called "teacher"), produces smothered rebellion,

A dim notion was growing up in her mind that the fact that she had never done a thing was no proof that she couldn't.