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
“I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus, and I would prefer to be even a satyr than a saint.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Ecce Homo
“Once being hard pressed in wrestling, and fearing to be thrown, he got the hand of his antagonist to his mouth, and bit it with all his force; and when the other loosed his hold presently, and said, "You bite, Alcibiades, like a woman." "No," replied he, "like a lion." Another”
― Plutarch, quote from Parallel Lives
“I was meant to land wherever he settled, like the ocean washing seashells onto the shore. Jack was the shell, in constant motion and movement, being tossed around from place to place by the ebb and flow of something more powerful than he. And I was the sand, gripping and holding on to him, comforting his tumble with each push and pull of the tide, yet always constant.”
― J. Sterling, quote from The Sweetest Game
“He dug and ploughed over his piece of land, and then sowed some turnip seed. Soon the seed began to show itself above ground, and there grew on turnip immensely large and thick, which seemed as if it would never have done growing, but was a princess among turnips; and as there had never before been seen such a turnip, so also there has never been such another since.”
― Jacob Grimm, quote from The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales
“Loneliness had been the trash can fire he huddled around for most of his life.”
― Michael Connelly, quote from The Last Coyote
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