Top 40 Sarah Orne Jewett Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

2. “Yes’m, old friends is always best, ’less you can catch a new one that’s fit to make an old one out of.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

3. “In the life of each of us there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

4. “The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

5. “A lean sorrow is hardest to bear.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

6. “Tact is after all a kind of mind reading.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

7. “It is not often given in a noisy world to come to the places of great grief and silence.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

8. “My dear father; my dear friend; the best and wisest man I ever knew, who taught me many lessons and showed me many things as we went together along the country by-ways.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

9. “Tain’t worthwhile to wear a day all out before it comes.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

10. “Wrecked on the lee shore of age.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

11. “Do not hurry too fast in these early winter days, – a quiet hour is worth more to you than anything you can do in it.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

12. “Life was resumed, and anxious living blew away as if it had not been. I could not breathe deep enough or long enough. It was a return to happiness.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

13. “It is the people who can do nothing who find nothing to do, and the secret to happiness in this world is not only to be useful, but to be forever elevating one’s uses.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

14. “God would not give us the same talent if what were right for men were wrong for women.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

15. “A harbor, even if it is a little harbor, is a good thing, since adventurers come into it as well as go out, and the life in it grows strong, because it takes something from the world, and has something to give in return.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

Featured in: Strong Quotes

16. “It seems to me like stealing, for men and women to live in the world and do nothing to make it better.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

17. “Love isn’t blind; it’s only love that sees!”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

18. “So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

19. “We are always looking forward to the passing and ending of winter, but when summer is here it seems as if summer must always last. As I went across the fields that day, I found myself half lamenting that the world must fade again, even that the best of her budding and bloom was only a preparation for another spring-time, for an awakening beyond the coming winter’s sleep.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

20. “Write it as it is, don’t try to make it like this or that. You can’t do it in anybody else’s way-you will have to make a way of your own.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

21. “Satisfaction, even after one has dined well, is not so interesting and eager a feeling as hunger.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

22. “What’s everybody’s business is nobody’s business...”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

23. “The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper – whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

24. “There’s more women likes to be loved than there is of those that loves.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

25. “The growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

26. “There’s some herb that’s good for everybody, except for them that thinks they’re sick when they ain’t.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

27. “It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance who knows what you know. I see so many new folks nowadays who seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation has got to have some root in the past, or else you have got to explain every remark you make, and it wears a person out.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

28. “My childhood is very vivid to me, and I don’t feel very different now from the way I felt then. It would appear I am the very same person, only with wrinkles.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

29. “Imagination is the only true thing in the world!”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

30. “This is a very small world; we are all within hail of each other. I dare say when we get to Heaven there will not be a stranger to make friends with. -A Country Doctor.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

31. “The old poets little knew what comfort they could be to a man.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

32. “There’s sometimes a good hearty tree growin’ right out of the bare rock, out o’ some crack that just holds the roots’, she went on to say, ‘right on the pitch o’ one o’ them bare stony hills where you can’t seem to see a wheelbarrowful o’ good earth in a place, but that tree’ll keep a green top in the driest summer. You lay your ear down to the ground an’ you’ll hear a little stream runnin’. Every such tree has got its own livin’ spring; there’s folks made to match ’em.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

33. “A story should be managed so that it should suggest interesting things to the reader instead of the author’s doing all the thinking for him, and setting it before him in black and white.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

34. “There is all the pleasure that one can have in golddigging in finding one’s hopes satisfied in the riches of a good hill of potatoes.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

35. “A community narrows down and grows dreadful ignorant when it is shut up to its own affairs, and gets no knowledge of the outside world except from a cheap, unprincipled paper.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

36. “Don’t scatter your fire! You are a prose writer: stick to your own tool!”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

37. “When I went in again the little house had suddenly grown lonely, and my room looked empty as it had the day I came. I and all my belongings had died out of it, and I knew how it would seem when Mrs. Todd came back and found her lodger gone. So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

38. “The bright flower was like a face. Somehow, the beauty and life of it were surprising in the plain room, like a gay little child who might suddenly appear in a doorway.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

39. “Some set more by such things as come from a distance, but I rec’lect mother always used to maintain that folks was meant to be doctored with the stuff that grew right about ’em.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

40. “When one really knows a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming acquainted with a single person. The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

41. “It is a splendid thing to have the use of any gift of God. It isn’t for us to choose again, or wonder and dispute, but just work in our own places, and leave the rest to God.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

42. “I’ve found that people who look at things as they are, and not as they wish them to be, are the ones who succeed.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

43. “Conformity is the inspiration of much second-rate virtue.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

44. “I took new pleasure in the thought that in a piece of wild pasture land like this one may get closest to Nature, and subsist upon what she gives of her own free will. There have been no drudging, heavy-shod ploughmen to overturn the soil, and vex it into yielding artificial crops. Here one has to take just what Nature is pleased to give, whether one is a yellow-bird or a human being.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

45. “Who was it said that you never get to a place until a day after you come, nor leave it until a day after you go?”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

46. “There is something out of gear about graded schools and all that. Memory is developed at the expense of what in general we are pleased to call thought and character.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

47. “In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

48. “There was a patient look on the old man’s face, as if the world were a great mistake and he had nobody with whom to speak his own language or find companionship.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett

49. “I have come to know what it is to have patience, but I have lost my hope.”

— Sarah Orne Jewett