Sarah Orne Jewett

“A community narrows down and grows dreadful ignorant when it is shut up to its own affairs, and gets no knowledge of the outside world except from a cheap, unprincipled paper.”

“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.”

“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.”

“God would not give us the same talent if what were right for men were wrong for women.”

“Tact is after all a kind of mind reading.”

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

“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.”

“When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.”

“I now remembered that Mrs. Todd had told me one day that Captain Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading.”

“The bright flower was like a face. Somehow, the beauty and life of it were surprising in the plain room, like a gay little child who might suddenly appear in a doorway.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”