Quotes from Sarah Orne Jewett

I often wondered a great deal about the inner life and thought of these self-contained old fishermen; their minds seemed to be fixed upon nature and the elements rather than upon any contrivances of man, like politics or theology.

The road was new to me, as roads always are, going back.

We who were her neighbors were full of gayety, which was but the reflected light from her beaming countenance. It was not the first time that I was full of wonder at the waste of human ability in this world, as a botanist wonders at the wastefulness of nature, the thousand seeds that die, the unused provision of every sort. The reserve force of society grows more and more amazing to one's thought.

The more one lives out of doors the more personality there seems to be in what we call inanimate things. The strength of the hills and the voice of the waves are no longer only grand poetical sentences, but an expression of something real, and more and more one finds God himself in the world, and believes that we may read the thoughts that He writes for us in the book of Nature.

Man has done his best to ruin the world he lives in.

It is not one's surroundings that can help or hinder – it is having a growing purpose in one's life to make the most of whatever is in one's reach. If you have but a few good books, learn those to the very heart of them. Don't for one moment believe that if you had different surroundings and opportunities you would find the upward path any easier to climb. One condition is like another, if you have not the determination and the power to grow in yourself.

tain't so pleasant as when poor dear was here. Oh, I didn't want to lose her an' she didn't want to go, but it had to be. Such things ain't for us to say; there's no yes an' no to it.

If clergymen knew their congregations as well as physicians do, the sermons would be often more closely related to the parish needs.

Find your quiet center of life and write from that to the world.

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.

It was mortifying to find how strong the habit of idle speech may become in one's self. One need not always be saying something in this noisy world.

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.

Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading.

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.

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

What has made this nation great? Not its heroes but its households.

I couldn't help thinkin' if she was as far out o' town as she was out o' tune, she wouldn't get back in a day.

There's more women likes to be loved than there is of those that loves.

There are plenty of people dragging themselves miserably through the world, because they are clogged and fettered with work for which they have no fitness... I can't help believing that nothing is better than to find one's work early and hold fast to it, and put all one's heart into it.

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

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

It is a splendid thing to have the use of any gift of God. It isn't for us to choose again, or wonder and dispute, but just work in our own places, and leave the rest to God.

be brisk, be splendid, and be public.