Quotes from Sarah Orne Jewett

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.

Imagination is the only true thing in the world!

Tact is after all a kind of mind reading.

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

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

Life was resumed, and anxious living blew away as if it had not been. I could not breathe deep enough or long enough. It was a return to happiness.

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.

Wrecked on the lee shore of age.

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.

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.

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper—whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

To work in silence and with all one's heart, that is the writer's lot; he is the only artist who must be solitary and yet needs the widest outlook on the world.

We were standing where there was a fine view of the harbor and its long stretches of shore all covered by the great army of the pointed firs, darkly cloaked and standing as if they waited to embark. As we looked far seaward among the outer islands, the trees seemed to march seaward still, going steadily over the heights and down to the water's edge.

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

I took new pleasure in the thought that in a piece of wild pasture land like this one may get closest to Nature, and subsist upon what she gives of her own free will. There have been no drudging, heavy-shod ploughmen to overturn the soil, and vex it into yielding artificial crops. Here one has to take just what Nature is pleased to give, whether one is a yellow-bird or a human being.

So we always keep the same hearts, though our outer framework fails and shows the touch of time.

We are more likely to busy ourselves with finding things to do than in doing with our might the work that is in our hands already.

T'aint' no use to look for public sperit 'less you've got some yourself.

It is in human nature to respect power; but all his manliness was at stake, and his natural rights would be degraded and lost, if he could not show his power to be greater than her own.

It had also affected the old fishermen's hard complexions, until one fancied that when Death claimed them it could only be with the aid, not of any slender modern dart, but the good serviceable harpoon of a seventeenth century woodcut.

There, don't you think I'm always a-fault-finding! When I get hold of the real thing in folks, I stick to 'em,—but there's an awful sight of poor material walking about that ain't worth the ground it steps on.

The coast of Maine was in former years brought so near to foreign shores by its busy fleet of ships that among the older men and women one still finds a surprising proportion of travelers. Each seaward-stretching headland with its high-set houses

Being furnished not only with a subject of conversation, but with a safe refuge in the kitchen in case of incompatibility, Mrs. Fosdick and I sat down, prepared to make the best of each other.

We go so far in our vigorous observance of the first commandment, and our fear of worshiping strange gods, that sometimes we are in danger of forgetting that we must worship God himself. And worship is something different from a certain sort of constant church-going, or from even trying to be conformers and to keep our own laws and our neighbors'.