Just David Quotes

“Why, it would be such fun,' he chuckled, 'to just forget all about the hours when the sun didn't shine, and remember only the nice, pleasant ones.”
― Eleanor H. Porter, Just David

“It is to be expected that when one's thoughts lead so persistently to one place, one's feet will follow.”
― Eleanor H. Porter, Just David

“Father says that I'm one little instrument in the great Orchestra of Life, and that I must see to it that I'm always in tune, and don't drag or hit false notes”
― Eleanor H. Porter, Just David

“Horas non numero nisi serenas,' 'I count - no - hours but - unclouded ones,”
― Eleanor H. Porter, Just David

“The friends, the relatives, the adoring public, the mint of money—they are all David's now. But once each year, man grown though he is, he picks up his violin and journeys to a little village far up among the hills. There in a quiet kitchen he plays to an old man and an old woman; and always to himself he says that he is practicing against the time when, his violin at his chin and the bow drawn across the strings, he shall go to meet his father in the far-away land, and tell him of the beautiful world he has left.”
― Eleanor H. Porter, Just David

“Side by side stood "The Lady of the Lake," "Treasure Island," and "David Copperfield"; and coverless and dogeared lay "Robinson Crusoe," "The Arabian Nights," and "Grimm's Fairy Tales." There were more, many more, and David devoured them all with eager eyes. The good in them he absorbed as he absorbed the sunshine; the evil he cast aside unconsciously—it rolled off, indeed, like the proverbial water from the duck's back.”
― Eleanor H. Porter, Just David

“More extraordinary than all this to David, however, was the fact that these people regarded HIM, not themselves, as being strange. As if it were not the most natural thing in the world to live with one's father in one's home on the mountain-top, and spend one's days trailing through the forest paths, or lying with a book beside some babbling little stream! As if it were not equally natural to take one's violin with one at times, and learn to catch upon the quivering strings the whisper of the winds through the trees! Even in winter, when the clouds themselves came down from the sky and covered the earth with their soft whiteness,—even then the forest was beautiful; and the song of the brook under its icy coat carried a charm and mystery that were quite wanting in the chattering freedom of summer. Surely there was nothing strange in all this, and yet these people seemed to think there was!”
― Eleanor H. Porter, Just David

“And they were so very strange—these people! There were the boys and men who rose at dawn—yet never paused to watch the sun flood the world with light; who stayed in the fields all day—yet never raised their eyes to the big fleecy clouds overhead; who knew birds only as thieves after fruit and grain, and squirrels and rabbits only as creatures to be trapped or shot. The women—they were even more incomprehensible. They spent the long hours behind screened doors and windows, washing the same dishes and sweeping the same floors day after day. They, too, never raised their eyes to the blue sky outside, nor even to the crimson roses that peeped in at the window. They seemed rather to be looking always for dirt, yet not pleased when they found it—especially if it had been tracked in on the heel of a small boy's shoe!”
― Eleanor H. Porter, Just David

“Oh, but it wouldn't be a useless walk, sir. Father said nothing was useless that helped to keep us in tune, you know."

"In tune!"

"I mean, you looked as father used to look sometimes, when he felt out of tune. And he always said there was nothing like a walk to put him back again. I—I was feeling a little out of tune myself to-day, and I thought, by the way you looked, that you were, too. So I asked you to go to walk.”
― Eleanor H. Porter, Just David

“Yes. But do you have to KEEP all these things, and clean them and clean them, like this, every day? Couldn't you give them to somebody, or throw them away?"

"Throw—these—things—away!" With a wild sweep of her arms, the horrified woman seemed to be trying to encompass in a protective embrace each last endangered treasure of mat and tidy. "Boy, are you crazy? These things are—are valuable. They cost money, and time and—and labor. Don't you know beautiful things when you see them?"

"Oh, yes, I love BEAUTIFUL things," smiled David, with unconsciously rude emphasis. "And up on the mountain I had them always. There was the sunrise, and the sunset, and the moon and the stars, and my Silver Lake, and the cloud-boats that sailed—"

But Mrs. Holly, with a vexed gesture, stopped him.

"Never mind, little boy. I might have known—brought up as you have been. Of course you could not appreciate such things as these. Throw them away, indeed!" And she fell to work again; but this time her fingers carried a something in their touch that was almost like the caress a mother might bestow upon an aggrieved child.”
― Eleanor H. Porter, Just David

“For a time neither the man nor the woman could speak. There was nothing in their humdrum, habit-smoothed tilling of the soil and washing of pots and pans to prepare them for a scene like this- a moonlight barn, a strange dead man, and that dead man;s son babbling of brooks and squirrels and playing jigs on a fiddle for a dirge. At last, however, Simeon found his voice.”
― Eleanor H. Porter, Just David

“But he's here- right here," he challenged shrilly. "Daddy, daddy, speak to me! It's David!" Reaching out his hand, he gently touched his fathers face. He drew back then, at once, his eyes distended with terror. "He isn't! He is- gone," he chattered frenziedly. "This isn't the father-part that KNOWS. It's the other- that they leave. He's left it behind him- like the squirrel, and the water in the brook.”
― Eleanor H. Porter, Just David

“And David leaped, and laughed, and loved it all, nor was any of it strange to him. The birds, the treed, the sun, the brook, the scurrying little creatures of the forest of his. But the man- the man did not leap or laughed, though he, too, loved it all. The man was afraid.”
― Eleanor H. Porter, Just David

“All this the man had planned carefully. He had meant that only the good and beautiful should have place in David's youth. It was not that he had intended that evil, unhappiness, and death should lack definition, only definiteness, in the boy's mind. It should be a case where the good and the beautiful should so fill the thoughts that there would be no room for anything else. This had been his plan. And thus far he had succeeded- succeeded so wonderfully that he began now, in the face of his own illness, and of what he feared would come of it, to doubt the wisdom of that planning.”
― Eleanor H. Porter, Just David