The Sketch Book Quotes

“There is in every true woman's heart a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity; but which kindles up, and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.”
― Washington Irving, The Sketch Book

“He is indeed the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart.”
― Washington Irving, Irving's Sketch Book

“Some minds corrode, and grow inactive, under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginative in the loneliness of confinement.”
― Washington Irving, The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon

“My whole course of life," I observed, "has been desultory, and I am unfitted for any periodically recurring task, or any stipulated labor of body or mind. I have no command of my talents, such as they are, and have to watch the varyings of my mind as I would those of a weathercock.”
― Washington Irving, The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon

“I visited various parts of my own country; and had I been merely a lover of fine scenery, I should have felt little desire to seek elsewhere its gratification, for on no country had the charms of nature been more prodigally lavished. Her mighty lakes, her oceans of liquid silver; her mountains, with their bright aerial tints; her valleys, teeming with wild fertility; her tremendous cataracts, thundering in their solitudes; her boundless plains, waving with spontaneous verdure; her broad, deep rivers, rolling in solemn silence to the ocean; her trackless forests, where vegetation puts forth all its magnificence; her skies, kindling with the magic of summer clouds and glorious sunshine;—no, never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful of natural scenery.”
― Washington Irving, The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon

“As I grew into boyhood, I extended the range of my observations. My holiday afternoons were spent in rambles about the surrounding country. I made myself familiar with all its places famous in history or fable. I knew every spot where a murder or robbery had been committed, or a ghost seen. I visited the neighboring villages, and added greatly to my stock of knowledge, by noting their habits and customs, and conversing with their sages and great men. I even journeyed one long summer's day to the summit of the most distant hill, whence I stretched my eye over many a mile of terra incognita, and was astonished to find how vast a globe I inhabited.”
― Washington Irving, The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon

“somehow or other, there is a genial sunshine about you that warms every creeping thing into heart and confidence. Your”
― Washington Irving, The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon

“The great charm, however, of English scenery is the moral feeling which seems to pervade it. It is associated in the mind with ideas of order, of quiet, of sober well-established principles, of hoary usage and reverend custom. Everything seems to be the growth of ages of regular and peaceful existence.”
― Washington Irving, The Sketch Book