Sarah Orne Jewett

“Her hospitality was something exquisite; she had the gift which so many women lack, of being able to make themselves and their houses belong entirely to a guest's pleasure,--that charming surrender for the moment of themselves and whatever belongs to them, so that they make a part of one's own life that can never be forgotten.”

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

“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 there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness.”

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

“I saw William Blackett’s escaping sail already far from land, and Captain Littlepage was sitting behind his closed window as I passed by, watching for some one who never came. I tried to speak to him, but he did not see me. There was a patient look on the old man’s face, as if the world were a great mistake and he had nobody with whom to speak his own language or find companionship.”

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

“be brisk, be splendid, and be public.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“This is a very small world; we are all within hail of each other. I dare say when we get to Heaven there will not be a stranger to make friends with.”

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

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

“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.”