Kate Douglas Wiggin Quotes

“The soul grows into lovely habits as easily as into ugly ones, and the moment a life begins to blossom into beautiful words and deeds, that moment a new standard of conduct is established, and your eager neighbors look to you for a continuous manifestation of the good cheer, the sympathy, the ready wit, the comradeship, or the inspiration, you once showed yourself capable of. Bear figs for a season or two, and the world outside the orchard is very unwilling you should bear thistles.”

“Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful World, With the wonderful water round you curled, And the wonderful grass upon your breast, World, you are beautifully drest.”

″‘I guess it don’t make no difference what you call it so long as you know where it is,’ remarked Mr. Cobb sententiously. Rebecca turned the full light of her eyes upon him reproachfully, almost severely, as she answered: ‘Oh! Don’t say that, and be like all the rest! It does make a difference what you call things.‘”

“Miranda Sawyer had a heart, of course, but she had never used it for any other purpose than the pumping and circulating of blood.”

“Rebecca’s eyes were like faith,—“the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

“There are certain narrow, unimaginative, and autocratic old people who seem to call out the most mischievous and sometimes the worst traits in children.”

“Her own future was close-folded still; but she leaned her head against the sun-warmed door, and closing her eyes, whispered, just as if she had been a child saying her prayers: ‘God bless aunt Miranda; God bless the brick house that was; God bless the brick house that is to be!‘”

“Rebecca held out her arms and the old aunt crept into them feebly, as she did on that day when she opened the grave of her buried love and showed the dead face, just for an instant, to a child. Warmth and strength and life flowed into the aged frame from the young one.”

″‘Why, mother!’ cried Rebecca, clasping her knees with her hands; ‘why, mother, it’s enough joy just to be here in the world on a day like this; to have the chance of seeing, feeling, doing, becoming! When you were seventeen, mother, wasn’t it good just to be alive? You haven’t forgotten?‘”

“It was home; her roof, her garden, her green acres, her dear trees; it was shelter for the little family at Sunnybrook.”