Lucy Larcom

“Like a plant that starts up in showers and sunshine and does not know which has best helped it to grow, it is difficult to say whether the hard things or the pleasant things did me the most good.”

“The curse of covetousness is that it destroys manhood by substituting money for character.”

“Some of us must wait for the best human gifts until we come to heavenly places. Our natural desire for musical utterance is perhaps a prophecy that in a perfect world we shall all know how to sing.”

“To different minds, poetry may present different phases. To me, the reverent faith of the people I lived among, and their faithful everyday living, was poetry; blossoms and trees and blue shies were poetry. God himself was poetry.”

“Our relatives form the natural setting of our childhood. We understand ourselves best and are best understood by others through the persons who came nearest to us in our earliest years.”

“A complete autobiography would indeed be a picture of the outer and inner universe photographed upon one little life's consciousness. For does not the whole world, seen and unseen, go to the making up of every human being?”

“If the world seems cold to you, kindle fires to warm it.”

“The first real unhappiness I remember to have felt was when some one told me, one day, that I did not love God. I insisted, almost tearfully, that I did; but I was told that if I did truly love Him I should always be good. I knew I was not that, and the feeling of sudden orphanage came over me like a bewildering cloud.”

“One mistake with beginners in writing is, that they think it important to spin out something long. It is a great deal better not to write more than a page or two, unless you have something to say, and can write it correctly.”

“Whatever science and philosophy may do for mankind, the world can never outgrow its need of the simplicity that is in Christ.”

“If the world's a veil of tears, Smile till rainbows span it.”

“Religion is life inspired by Heavenly Love; and life is something fresh and cheerful and vigorous.”

“The true idea of a church has not yet been shown the world, a visible Church, I mean, unless it was in the very earliest times; yes, the twelve disciples bound to their Lord in love, to do his work forever, that was a church, a Christian family.”

“I am willing to make any part of my life public, if it will help others.”

“Few parents are aware of the difficulties that beset the minds of the little philosophers and theologians who sit upon their knees or play at their feet; and many a parent could not comprehend the disturbance, if he were aware of it.”

“God be thanked for the thinkers of good and noble thoughts! It wakes up all the best in ourselves, to come into close contact with others greater and better in every way than we are.”

“There is something in the place where we were born that holds us always by the heart-strings.”

“Rich or poor, every child comes into the world with some imperative need of its own, which shapes its individuality.”

“Everything in nature has its own intrinsic charm, as the work of its Creator's hand; but the chief beauty of the whole lies in its suggested relations to humanity. Things announce and wait for persons. The house would not have been thus beautifully built and furnished, except for an expected tenant.”

“A journal of the 'subjective' kind I have always thought foolish, as nurturing a morbid self -consciousness in the writer; and yet, alone so much as I am, it is well to have some sort of a ventilator from the interior.”