"Yes'm, old friends is always best, 'less you can catch a new one that's fit to make an old one out of. "
— Sarah Orne Jewett

"'It seems to me like stealing, for men and women to live in the world and do nothing to make it better.' "
— Sarah Orne Jewett (A Country Doctor)

"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."
— Sarah Orne Jewett (The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Fiction)

"Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading."
— Sarah Orne Jewett

"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. - A Country Doctor"
— Sarah Orne Jewett

"be brisk, be splendid, and be public."
— Sarah Orne Jewett (Martha's Lady)

"What has made this nation great? Not its heroes but its households."
— Sarah Orne Jewett

"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."
— Sarah Orne Jewett (A Country Doctor)

"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. -A Country Doctor"
— Sarah Orne Jewett

"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."
— Sarah Orne Jewett (A Country Doctor)

"I now remembered that Mrs. Todd had told me one day that Captain Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading."
— Sarah Orne Jewett