Bethany > Bethany's Quotes

“There is no place like a tree for comfort, safety and good living. I'm sorry for anyone who can't live in a tree.”
― Thornton W. Burgess, At the Smiling Pool

“Spring had come once more to Green Gables - the beautiful capricious, reluctant Canadian spring, lingering along through April and May in a succession of sweet, fresh, chilly days, with pink sunsets and miracles of resurrection and growth.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“And then as the evening changed the hour, at house after house on the twilight streets, under the immense oaks and elms, on shady porches, people would begin to appear, like those figures who tell good or bad weather in rain-or-shine clocks.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“The last of our summer visitants has taken his departure. About a fortnight ago a Chiff-chaff was constantly to be seen hopping about the Goose-berry bushes in the garden: - the last to leave us, he is usually the first to arrive.”
― Edith Holden, The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady

“Everything speaks of the autumn now. The sea roars hollowly day and night, the fields are bare and sere, bordered by strips of deep-dyed golden-rod, asters, and life-everlasting; and the ponds are blue – blue – not the steely blue of winter or the deep azure of summer, but a clear, steadfast serene blue, as if the water were past all the moods and tenses of passion and had settled down to tranquility.”
― L.M. Montgomery, The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1889-1900

“And then the nights came on and the frosts took hold again, and blades of cold slid under doors and cut the knees off those who still knelt to say the rosary.”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”
― Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

“I must do as other men do, and think what will please the world and bring in money; look for a little opening in the London crowd, and push myself; set up in a watering-place, or go to some southern town where there are plenty of idle English, and get myself puffed, - that is the sort of shell I must creep into and try to keep my soul alive in.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“I cannot get him to write or speak in real, solid earnest. I don't much mind it now, but if it be always so, what shall I do with the serious part of myself?”
― Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

“How passionately she longed to be important to somebody again—not important on platforms, not important as an asset in an organization, but privately important, just to one other person, quite privately, nobody else to know or notice. It didn't seem much to ask in a world so crowded with people, just to have one of them, only one out of all the millions, to oneself.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April

“I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Our poor place of abode, our humble calling, our assumed relationship, and our assumed name, are all used alike as a means of hiding us in the house-forest of London.”
― Wilkie Collins

“He hated going back to himself as he would have hated putting on a shabby suit of clothes, a grease-spotted, unpressed suit of clothes that had not been very good even when it was new.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Our battle is a hard one and for a long time it will seem to be a losing one, but it will never really be that as long as we keep the power of being happy. And happiness has to be deliberately sought for, gained; even that doesn't solve the problem, but it does make it easier for us to fight.”
― Jessie Redmon Fauset, There Is Confusion

“She did not shut it properly because she knew that it is very silly to shut oneself into a wardrobe, even if it is not a magic one.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again