Country Of The Pointed Firs Quotes

It was mortifying to find how strong the habit of idle speech may become in one’s self. One need not always be saying something in this noisy world.

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.

I couldn't help thinkin' if she was as far out o' town as she was out o' tune, she wouldn't get back in a day.

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

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.

It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance that knows what you know. I see so many of these new folks nowadays, that seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation's got to have some root in the past, or else you've got to explain every remark you make, an' it wears a person out.

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.

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

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.

Her hospitality was something exquisite; she had the gift which so many women lack, of being able to make themselves and their houses belong entirely to a guest's pleasure,--that charming surrender for the moment of themselves and whatever belongs to them, so that they make a part of one's own life that can never be forgotten.

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

I saw William Blackett’s escaping sail already far from land, and Captain Littlepage was sitting behind his closed window as I passed by, watching for some one who never came. I tried to speak to him, but he did not see me. 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.

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.

If clergymen knew their congregations as well as physicians do, the sermons would be often more closely related to the parish needs.

Man has done his best to ruin the world he lives in.

The road was new to me, as roads always are, going back.

So we always keep the same hearts, though our outer framework fails and shows the touch of time.

T’aint’ no use to look for public sperit ‘less you’ve got some yourself.

We are more likely to busy ourselves with finding things to do than in doing with our might the work that is in our hands already.

... [T]he ease that belongs to simplicity is charming enough to make up for whatever a simple life may lack, and the gifts of peace are not for those who live in the thick of battle.

tain't so pleasant as when poor dear was here. Oh, I didn't want to lose her an' she didn't want to go, but it had to be. Such things ain't for us to say; there's no yes an' no to it.

Being furnished not only with a subject of conversation, but with a safe refuge in the kitchen in case of incompatibility, Mrs. Fosdick and I sat down, prepared to make the best of each other.

I often wondered a great deal about the inner life and thought of these self-contained old fishermen; their minds seemed to be fixed upon nature and the elements rather than upon any contrivances of man, like politics or theology.

It had also affected the old fishermen's hard complexions, until one fancied that when Death claimed them it could only be with the aid, not of any slender modern dart, but the good serviceable harpoon of a seventeenth century woodcut.

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.

We go so far in our vigorous observance of the first commandment, and our fear of worshiping strange gods, that sometimes we are in danger of forgetting that we must worship God himself. And worship is something different from a certain sort of constant church-going, or from even trying to be conformers and to keep our own laws and our neighbors’.

The more one lives out of doors the more personality there seems to be in what we call inanimate things. The strength of the hills and the voice of the waves are no longer only grand poetical sentences, but an expression of something real, and more and more one finds God himself in the world, and believes that we may read the thoughts that He writes for us in the book of Nature.

We who were her neighbors were full of gayety, which was but the reflected light from her beaming countenance. It was not the first time that I was full of wonder at the waste of human ability in this world, as a botanist wonders at the wastefulness of nature, the thousand seeds that die, the unused provision of every sort. The reserve force of society grows more and more amazing to one's thought.

It is not one’s surroundings that can help or hinder – it is having a growing purpose in one’s life to make the most of whatever is in one’s reach. If you have but a few good books, learn those to the very heart of them. Don’t for one moment believe that if you had different surroundings and opportunities you would find the upward path any easier to climb. One condition is like another, if you have not the determination and the power to grow in yourself.

Through this piece of rough pasture ran a huge shape of stone like the great backbone of an enormous creature. At the end, near the woods, we could climb up on it and walk along to the highest point; there above the circle of pointed firs we could look down over all the island, and could see the ocean that circled this and a hundred other bits of island-ground, the mainland shore and all the far horizons. It gave a sudden sense of space, for nothing stopped the eye or hedged one in,—that sense of liberty in space and time which great prospects always give.

Then I had the good of my reading,” he explained presently. “I had no books; the pastor spoke but little English, and all his books were foreign; but I used to say over all I could remember. The old poets little knew what comfort they could be to a man. I was well acquainted with the works of Milton, but up there it did seem to me as if Shakespeare was the king; he has his sea terms very accurate, and some beautiful passages were calming to the mind. I could say them over until I shed tears; there was nothing beautiful to me in that place but the stars above and those passages of verse.

Suggested Reading Nuha al-Radi, Baghdad Diaries Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin Jane Austen, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Pride and Prejudice Saul Bellow, The Dean’s December and More Die of Heartbreak Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes Henry Fielding, Shamela and Tom Jones Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank Henry James, The Ambassadors, Daisy Miller, and Washington Square Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony and The Trial Katherine Kressman Taylor, Address Unknown Herman Melville, The Confidence Man Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading, and Pnin Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs Iraj Pezeshkzad, My Uncle Napoleon Diane Ravitch, The Language Police Julie Salamon, The Net of Dreams Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis Scheherazade, A Thousand and One Nights F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries Joseph Skvorecky, The Engineer of Human Souls Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno Peter Taylor, A Summons to Memphis Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups and St. Maybe Mario Vargas Llosa, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter Reading

Back then the Appalachian Trail was barely a trail at all—it consisted of over 2,000 miles of mostly unmarked wilderness from Mount Katahdin in Maine to Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia. A man named Benton MacKaye had proposed its creation in the early 1920s. He had utopian visions about a place that could “transcend the economic scramble” and be a balm on the American psyche after World War I. He thought the trail could lift people out of the drudgery of modern life. Government workers needed a relaxing place to recuperate, he wrote in his proposal. Housewives, he said, could use the trail’s rejuvenating powers too. They could come during their leisure time. It could even be a cure for mental illness, whose sufferers “need acres not medicine.” Civilization was weakening, he said. Americans needed a path forward. The Appalachian Trail was the solution. There was still so much undeveloped land in the United States. The West had Yosemite and Yellowstone, and many more national parks, but the East Coast was the most populous part of the country, and the people who lived there should have something to rival the western parks. National parks already dotted the East Coast’s landscape, but what if they could be united? MacKaye imagined what Americans would see as they strode the length of the trail: the “Northwoods” pointed firs on Mount Washington, the placid, pine-rimmed lakes of the Adirondacks. They would cross the Delaware Water Gap, the Potomac, and Harpers Ferry. They could follow Daniel Boone’s footsteps through southern Appalachia to the hardwood forests of North Carolina and end at Springer Mountain in Georgia. They would know their country. Barbara was swept up by