Pressed for rules and verities, All i recolelct are these: Feed a cold and starve a fever. Argue with no true believer. Think-too-long is never-act. Scratch a myth and find a fact.
Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.
To be a housewife is a difficult, a wrenching, sometimes an ungrateful job if it is looked on only as a job. Regarded as a profession, it is the noblest as it is the most ancient of the catalogue. Let none persuade us differently or the world is lost indeed.
Borrow my umbrellas, my clothes, my money, and I will likely not think of them again. But borrow my books and I will be on your track like a bloodhound until they are returned.
The successful truck gardener can never go out to dinner in the summer or spend a week end away, because his conscience tells him he has to be at home eating up his corn or packaging his beans for the freezer.
I have read that during the process of canonization the Catholic Church demands proof of joy in the candidate, and although I have not been able to track down chapter and verse I like the suggestion that dourness is not a sacred attribute.
History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art...
There is satisfaction in seeing one’s household prosper; in being both bountiful and provident.
Meanness inherits a set of silverware and keeps it in the bank. Economy uses it only on important occasions, for fear of loss. Thrift sets the table with it every night for pure pleasure, but counts the butter spreaders before they are put away.
Say what you will, making a marriage work is a woman’s business.
A lover would find life less broken apart after a misguided love affair if they could feel that they had been sinful rather than foolish.
Getting along with men isn’t what’s truly important. The vital knowledge is how to get along with one man.
The East is a montage. It is old and it is young, very green in summer, very white in winter, gregarious, withdrawn and at once both sophisticated and provincial.
Meek-eyed parents hasten down the ramps To greet their offspring, terrible from camps.
The saints differ from us in their exuberance, the excess of our human talents. Moderation is not their secret. It is in the wildness of their dreams, the desperate vitality of their ambitions, that they stand apart from ordinary people of good will.
The Enemy, who wears her mother’s usual face and confidential tone, has access; doubtless stares into her writing case and listens on the phone.
Time is the thief you cannot banish.
Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense.
Please to put a nickel, please to put a dime. How petitions trickle in at Christmas time!
God know that a mother need fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul.