It is not good for all our wishes to be filled; through sickness we recognize the value of health; through evil, the value of good; through hunger, the value of food; through exertion, the value of rest.
Some people think that doctors and nurses can put scrambled eggs back into the shell.
Professional psychologists seem to think that they are the only people who make sense out of human actions. The rest of us know that everybody tries to do just this. What else is gossip?
No Vermont town ever let anybody in it starve.
Oh, yes, of course I like music, too. Very much. It’s so pleasant of an evening, especially when made by your friends at home. I often say I like it better than cards. Though I must say I do like a good game of bridge.
You think religion is what’s inside a little building filled with pretty lights from stained glass windows. But it’s not. It’s wings! Wings!
There is no human relationship more intimate than that of nurse and patient, one in which the essentials of character are more rawly revealed.
History is worth reading when it tells us truly what the attitude toward life was in the past.
Everyone bowed to that unwritten law of family life which ordains that, in the long run, everyone submerges his personal preference in the effort to conform to that of the member of the circle who complains most loudly and is most difficult to satisfy.
Compared with more emotional types, Vermonters seem to have few passions. But those they have are great and burning. The greatest is their conviction that without freedom human life is not worth living.
On New Year’s Day every calendar, large and small, has the same number of dates. But we soon learn that the years are of very different lengths.
Vermont is the only place in America where I ever hear thrift spoken of with respect.
What is life, but one long risk?
Father sticks to it that anything that promises to pay too much can’t help being risky.
Never since the dawn of human history, as far as I can find out, did people long settled in any region give a friendly welcome to newcomers. One of the disagreeable traits of our human nature seems to be to dislike on sight people who come later than the first settlers.
I’m as fixed in my opinion as the man who thought he was a hard-boiled egg.
Almost anything is enough to keep alive someone who wishes nothing for himself but time to write music...
There’s no healthy life possible without some sensual feeling between the husband and wife, but there’s nothing in the world more awful than married life when it’s the only common ground.
You can’t wish a body any worse luck than to get what he wants.
Life takes hold of us with strong hands and makes us greater than we thought.
What a fearfully distracting, perplexing and heart-searching business it is to live.