Kate Douglas Wiggin · 184 pages
Rating: (30.7K votes)
“The soul grows into lovely habits as easily as into ugly ones, and the moment a life begins to blossom into beautiful words and deeds, that moment a new standard of conduct is established, and your eager neighbors look to you for a continuous manifestation of the good cheer, the sympathy, the ready wit, the comradeship, or the inspiration, you once showed yourself capable of. Bear figs for a season or two, and the world outside the orchard is very unwilling you should bear thistles.”
― Kate Douglas Wiggin, quote from Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
“Miranda Sawyer had a heart, of course, but she had never used it for any other purpose than the pumping and circulating of blood.”
― Kate Douglas Wiggin, quote from Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
“There are certain narrow, umimaginative, and autocratic old people who seem to call out the most mischievous and sometimes the worst traits in children.”
― Kate Douglas Wiggin, quote from Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
“Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful World,
With the wonderful water round you curled,
And the wonderful grass upon your breast,
World, you are beautifully drest!”
― Kate Douglas Wiggin, quote from Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
“Rebecca's eyes were like faith,—"the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Under her delicately etched brows they glowed like two stars, their dancing lights half hidden in lustrous darkness. Their glance was eager and full of interest, yet never satisfied; their steadfast gaze was brilliant and mysterious, and had the effect of looking directly through the obvious to something beyond, in the object, in the landscape, in you. They had never been accounted for, Rebecca's eyes. The school teacher and the minister at Temperance had tried and failed; the young artist who came for the summer to sketch the red barn, the ruined mill, and the bridge ended by giving up all these local beauties and devoting herself to the face of a child,—a small, plain face illuminated by a pair of eyes carrying such messages, such suggestions, such hints of sleeping power and insight, that one never tired of looking into their shining depths, nor of fancying that what one saw there was the reflection of one's own thought.”
― Kate Douglas Wiggin, quote from Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
“Nobody knows you.
You don't know yourself.
And I, who am half in love with you,
What am I in love with?
My own imaginings?”
― D.H. Lawrence, quote from The Complete Poems (Poetry Library)
“For the people of my country," Renato said, "water is everything: love, life, religion... even God."
"It is like that for me too," I said. "In English we call that a metaphor."
"Of course," said Renato, "and water is the most abundant metaphor on earth.”
― Pam Houston, quote from Waltzing the Cat
“So this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, quote from The Scent of Water
“what was it they called you? It’s on the tip of my tongue. It was something to do with cats and large amounts of body fat…”
― Graham Parke, quote from No Hope for Gomez!
“Think you are weak, think you lack what it takes, think you will lose, think you are second class - think this way and you are doomed to mediocrity.”
― David J. Schwartz, quote from Magic of Thinking Big
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