Great Throughts Treasury

"A time of quietude brings things into proportion and gives us strength. We all need to take time from the busyness of living, even it be only 10 minutes to watch the sun go down or the city lights blossom against a canyoned sky. We need time to dream, time to remember, and time to reach toward the infinite. Time to be."

"But housekeeping is fun. It is one job where you enjoy the results right along as you work. You may work all day washing and ironing, but at night you have the delicious feeling of sunny clean sheets and airy pillows to lie on. If you clean, you sit down at nightfall with the house shining and faintly smelling of wax, all yours to enjoy right then and there. And if you cook—that creation you lift from the oven goes right to the table."

"Almost all words do have color and nothing is more pleasant than to utter a pink word and see someone's eyes light up and know it is a pink word for him or her too."

"Happiness of heart can never be measured out and bundled up, it's intangible. We keep running after it, grasping for it, and the heat of our running so seldom brings it closer. But now and then there may be a moment. We look at something and know it is good and beautiful. Those moments are happiness."

"Feed your life from the well of sweetness."

"It is Jill's theory that in every life there is one dog. Other dogs may come and go, but there is one grand affair. I feel that is probably right and yet it worries me, for it might mean that I am a fickle person. For I seem able to love deeply just the dog I am looking at."

"I suppose I am a sparrow, a stay-at-home bird."

"Indian summer comes gently, folds over the hills and valleys as softly as the fall of a leaf on a windless day. It is always unexpected. After a sharp cold spell, we wake one morning and look out and the very air is golden. The sky has a delicate dreamy color, and the yet un-fallen leaves on the bravest trees have a secure look, as if they would never, never fall."

"There is a kind of immortality in every garden."

"Nothing much happens unless you believe in it and believing there is hope for the world is a way to move toward it."

"Perhaps, after all, our best thoughts come when we are alone. It is good to listen, not to voices but to the wind blowing, to the brook running cool over polished stones, to bees drowsy with the weight of pollen. If we attend to the music of the earth, we reach serenity. And then, in some unexplained way, we share it with others."

"We need time to dream, time to remember, and time to reach the infinite. Time to be."

"When my own mother died, there seemed to me to be no answer to anything. For a time the only universality was death. And then I remember walking in the dusk along the quiet little street toward the house now so empty and meaningless. There was light enough from the sky to cast the lattice shadow of leaves on the walk. The sound of the river was steady and swift, and the air smelled of sulphur from the mills beyond it. As I looked up, a delicate petal of moon drifted into the tender blue, and all at once I thought, “How beautiful God made the world! How wonderful that the stars still shine!” And I was comforted."

"Well, any love makes us vulnerable. Whatever we love will give the gift of pain somewhere along the road. But who would live sealed in spiritual cellophane just to keep from ever being hurt? There are a few people like that. I'm sorry for them. I think they are as good as dead."