Rachel Field > Quotes

“Affections cannot be stolen, madam. They are given freely or not at all.”
― Rachel Field, All This, and Heaven Too

“Isn't it strange some people make
You feel so tired inside,
Your thoughts begin to shrivel up
Like leaves all brown and dried!
But when you're with some other ones,
It's stranger still to find
Your thoughts as thick as fireflies
All shiny in your mind!”
― Rachel Field

“The more one suffered and lived, the more one had known of joy and grief, the deeper the response must be if an artist were great enough to summon it.”
― Rachel Field, All This, and Heaven Too

“One grew used to years, like garments. At least one knew where the holes and patched places were; one had learned not to strain threadbare folds past endurance. A new year felt stiff and semi-fitted as one tried to move in it without self-consciousness. It was like dresses that used to be made to allow for growth, too sturdy and voluminous and reaching to boot tops. Only time and hard use would accomplish the fitting, and I did not look forward to that inevitable process.”
― Rachel Field, And Now Tomorrow

“Integrity of thought, flexibility of mind, and a consuming curiosity concerning the world and its occupants were the touchstones to her friendship. Whether she happened to find these in some struggling gifted youth or in some person of recognized achievement, her response was equally sincere. The sensitive antennae of her own sympathy and human awareness reached out in a roomful of people and unerringly found minds to quicken hers, talents to match her own. She loved wit, but not at the expense of wisdom. She delighted in good company and the exchange of talk, yet she was seldom deceived by mere superficial brilliance.” -p. 505”
― Rachel Field, All This, and Heaven Too

“It only takes a drop of poison to turn what is sound to something rotten and corrupt.” -p. 201”
― Rachel Field, All This, and Heaven Too

“But I was so sure of myself. I believed I could manage my own life. Mud might spatter and spoil other skirts, but not mine. Somehow I believed no harm could come to me because I meant no harm to others. I was defiant and proud because I felt too sure of myself.’
“‘You are not the first to make that mistake,’ he answered gravely. ‘We all believe our lives are our own till we find we cannot separate them from other lives.’” -p. 300”
― Rachel Field

“When questioned in court (and she refused a lawyer): “All her life she had loved words and kindled to them, but now she was in their power. They shot to and fro, like shuttles weaving the threads of some invisible pattern…
“The quick blade of his irony delicately laid bare the tissues wrapping cause and motive. He must trap her into some unguarded admission of complicity. But she, too, held a blade as powerful as her questioners. She was speaking the truth. She had nothing to hide from him.” -p. 295”
― Rachel Field, All This, and Heaven Too

“I heard it once again, coming to me across miles of air from a far away concert hall. I knew when I heard the drums begin their familiar beat of hammers on the wooden hulls what I had known so surely that night of his concert and out there alone with him in the sort, that nothing which has ever stirred the heard can be lost to us.”
― Rachel Field

“Reputation is a prize you’ve won for yourself with self-denial and hard work. If you throw it away, what have you left to fall back on? How will you contrive to live without it?” -p. 198”
― Rachel Field, All This, and Heaven Too

“I heard it once again, coming to me across miles of air from a far away concert hall. I knew when I heard the drums begin their familiar beat of hammers on the wooden hulls what I had known so surely that night of his concert and out there alone with him in the storm, that nothing which has ever stirred the heard can be lost to us.”
― Rachel Field

“Love, when it comes for the first time, has the fierce and bewildering beat of spring in its pulses. Such ecstasy and despair are not to be reckoned with in terms of sanity and reason. The foolish and wise are equally at its mercy. Let no one doubt its power to exalt or betray, for it can rise renewed from bludgeonings or shrivel at a single breath. I think we were not meant to endure its rigours for more than a brief span.”
― Rachel Field, And Now Tomorrow

“Oh, well, it might look like a patterned world, laid out in prim design, but to those living there it could never be so simple. They were as alive as she: that old peasant contriving to outwit the cold; that woman anxiously counting her comical flock lest one goose escape her vigilance; all those who slept, or toiled, or loved under the low-hung roofs or the sharp turrets. Those people out there, if they caught sight of her own face pressed close to the window pane, might be speculating about her. To them she was part of the pattern of the lumbering train with its trail of smoke and little boxlike carriages. Perhaps they envied her, riding at ease to distant Paris. How little they knew of that! How little she herself know what awaited her at the end of the journey!”
― Rachel Field

“The daily venom of the Duchesse’s jealousy had corroded his self-control. It was as if an oak tree that had defied storms and woodsmen had fallen at last under the incessant hammerings of a woodpecker.” -p. 299”
― Rachel Field, All This, and Heaven Too

“Only children, I thought, can play and talk together without this self-imposed constraint. And even children’s eyes are quick to note the difference between a patched sweater and a squirrel muff. They recognize the outward symbols and are more wary than we guess. I found myself wondering when I had first been made aware of the invisible barriers that are so much more formidable than those of brick and stone and barbed wire.”
― Rachel Field, And Now Tomorrow

“I broke off, having said more than I had meant to, but if I had risen up with a hammer in one hand and a sickle in the other I could not have startled the group about the table more.”
― Rachel Field, And Now Tomorrow

“It’s different with a man, I would reason; he doesn’t have to make his whole world of a single person.”
― Rachel Field

“No hardy perennial has the enduring quality of hope. Cut it to the roots, stamp it underfoot, let frost and fire work their will, and still some valiant shoot will push, to grow again on such scanty fare as it can find. Only time and the cruel quicklime of fact can destroy that stubborn urgency.”
― Rachel Field, And Now Tomorrow

“We none of us hear all we might.”
― Rachel Field, And Now Tomorrow

“Miracles are out of fashion nowadays. Or perhaps it is only that they have been explained away from us. Radios and newsreels and words have shorn them of their mystery. Yet to each of us, I think, a miracle is given at some time in our lives. We may not choose the moment it shall be revealed or the form it shall take. We may not even realize till long afterwards that it was our privilege to be part of one. Our minds may betray the wonder that our hearts accept. I fought against the miracle that was to be mine, but there was no denying it when it came to me.”
― Rachel Field, And Now Tomorrow

“At such tense moments it often happens, as it happened to me then, that some insignificant object will become forever linked to our extremity. We must recall the exact shape of a leaf whose shadow fell across the blind of a sickroom; the scroll on the handle of a spoon out fingers gripped in the numbness of despair, the lace that edged the handkerchief we pressed to our lips to hide their trembling.”
― Rachel Field, And Now Tomorrow

“In the adult world to which I suddenly realized we all belonged, I supposed a triangle would be substituted for the outline of a heart. Well, after all, what was a triangle but a heart with the grace taken out of it?”
― Rachel Field, And Now Tomorrow

“It's been so happy for us all to have you here, and I've tried not to think of - of the accounting that you and I, too, must give to the Duchesse. I cannot help feeling that you - that we shall pay dearly because you came with us and left her behind."

"I always pay." He spoke evenly, but his brows drew together in a frown. "Sometimes I pay most for what I never had. I've been happy these few days, and at least that's something on my side of the ledger.”
― Rachel Field, All This, and Heaven Too

“When you have reason to doubt the man you love another man’s kiss may seem a poor substitute, but it can bolster up a woman’s pride. We may want only the love that is denied; but to know that we continued to be desirable is a prop to which we cling, and cling we must to whatever our hearts can lay hold on.”
― Rachel Field, And Now Tomorrow

“They shan't humiliate me to please themselves.”
― Rachel Field, All This, and Heaven Too

“We are less indispensable than we think, even to those we love.”
― Rachel Field, And Now Tomorrow

“The drip of cold rain in the darkness and those four words he had spoken became one to me as I stood watching him go down the path—fond, casual words that were never meant to be weighted down with the importance I gave them. Yet all those days and weeks and months and years afterwards my heart echoed them. If they became distorted and magnified out of all proportion, the fault is mine and mine alone. For I had no right to cling to them as I did because my need of their reassurance was so great. Yet I am not the first, and I shall not be the last, to try to make a bowstring into an anchor chain.”
― Rachel Field, And Now Tomorrow