Top 30 Mary Webb Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The well of Providence is deep. It’s the buckets we bring to it that are small.”

— Mary Webb

2. “Saddle your dreams before you ride em.”

— Mary Webb

3. “Every time I meet a tree, if I am truly awake, I stand in awe before it. I listen to its voice, a silent sermon moving me to the depths, touching my heart, and stirring up within my soul a yearning to give my all.”

— Mary Webb

4. “Nature’s music is never over; her silences are pauses, not conclusions.”

— Mary Webb

5. “If you stop to be kind, you must swerve often from your path.”

— Mary Webb

6. “It made me gladsome to be getting some education, it being like a big window opening.”

— Mary Webb

7. “The past is only the present become invisible and mute; its memoried glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious.”

— Mary Webb

8. “Green is the fresh emblem of well founded hopes. In blue the spirit can wander, but in green it can rest.”

— Mary Webb

9. “Fragrance is the voice of inanimate things.”

— Mary Webb

10. “Autumn is full of leave-taking. In September the swallows are chattering of destination and departure like a crowd of tourists.”

— Mary Webb

11. “Give me good digestion, Lord, And also something to digest; but where and how that something comes I leave to Thee, who knoweth best.”

— Mary Webb

12. “We are tomorrow’s past.”

— Mary Webb

13. “Love unspoken is the most tremendous force in the world. One is amazed at the way in which people waste their time making speeches, agitating, praying, even. They might save their breath. The great lovers of the world, in silence, rule the world.”

— Mary Webb

14. “The love of nature is a passion for those in whom it once lodges. It can never be quenched. It cannot change. It is a furious, burning, physical greed, as well as a state of mystical exaltation. It will have its own.”

— Mary Webb

15. “The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow’s past.”

— Mary Webb

16. “Autumn is full of leave-taking.”

— Mary Webb

17. “For the world is founded and built up on death, and the reality of death is neither to be questioned nor feared. Death is a dark dream, but it is not a nightmare. It is mankind’s lack of pity, mankind’s fatal propensity for torture, that is the nightmare.”

— Mary Webb

18. “But when you dwell in a house you mislike, you will look out of a window a deal more than those that are content with their dwelling.”

— Mary Webb

19. “I love you already, and if these things be done in the dry tree, what shall be done in the green?”

— Mary Webb

20. “If you know much about your work – why you work, how you work, your aims – you are probably not a poet.”

— Mary Webb

21. “She had for so many years been trying to be like other people, that she was now like nothing in heaven or earth.”

— Mary Webb

22. “The more anybody wants a thing, the more they do think others want it.”

— Mary Webb

23. “It’s the folks that depend on us for this and for the other that we most do miss.”

— Mary Webb

24. “To many women marriage is only this. It is merely a physical change impinging on their ordinary nature, leaving their mentality untouched, their self-possession intact. They are not burnt by even the red fire of physical passion – far less by the white fire of love.”

— Mary Webb

25. “Beguildy looked at me over the rim of a great measure of mead. ‘Saddle your dreams afore you ride ‘em, my wench,’ he said.”

— Mary Webb

26. “I thought she had a good heart, though not much respectability- or maybe it was because of that.”

— Mary Webb

27. “Who can say which is the greater sign of creative power, the sun with its planet system swinging with governed impetus to some incalculable end, or the gold sallow catkin with its flashing system of little flies?”

— Mary Webb

28. “Labor brings a thing nearer the hearts core.”

— Mary Webb

29. “She had so deep a kinship with the trees, so intuitive a sympathy with leaf and flower, that it seemed as if the blood in her veins was not slow-moving human blood, but volatile sap.”

— Mary Webb

30. “For the more a soul conforms to the sanity of others, the more does it become insane.”

— Mary Webb

31. “There are misfortunes that make you spring up and rush to save yourself, but, there are others that are too bad for this, for they leave nought to do. Then a stillness falls on the soul, like the stillness of a rabbit when the stoat looks hotly upon it and it knows that there is no more to be done.”

— Mary Webb

32. “Not only had he looked at me, but he had looked with favour and longing, and though I knew it was only because the truth was hidden from him, yet I was glad of what I had, as a winter bird is, that will come to your hand for a little crumb, though in plenteous times she would but mock you from the topmost bough.”

— Mary Webb

33. “What did I do, I, that knew his smile was my summer?”

— Mary Webb