Sarah Orne Jewett Quotes

Somebody asked me what I wanted to do. I just said I wanted to…just to give back to it what it’s given me. And to meet all the other people that are doing it…just to be in the world, really.

Sitting there with them, it was almost hard to remember when I first came to Perkins, so determined to remember to be a one-woman operation to the end. But that was the thing about taking help and giving it, or so I was learning; there was no such thing as really getting even. Instead, this connection, once opened, remained ongoing over time.

Sharing the holiday with other people, and feeling that you're giving of yourself, gets you past all the commercialism.

A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.

The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.

Your community is your survival.

You are where you are today because you stand on somebody's shoulders. And wherever you are heading, you cannot get there by yourself. If you stand on the shoulders of others, you have a reciprocal responsibility to live your life so that others may stand on your shoulders. It's the quid pro quo of life. We exist temporarily through what we take, but we live forever through what we give

You can't make any one person your world. The trick is to take what each can give you and build a world from it.

Nobody can survive alone, in this world. People have bonds, and sometimes those bonds are broken. And then, that person goes spinning off and connects with someone else.

What is family? They were the people who claimed you. In good, in bad, in parts or in whole, they were the ones who showed up, who stayed in there, regardless. It wasn't just about blood relations or shared chromosomes, but something wider, bigger. Cora was right - we had many families over time. Our family of origion, the family we created, as well as the gorups you moved thorugh while all of this was happening: friends, lovers, sometimes even strangers. None of them were perfect, and we couldn't expect them to be. You couldn't make any one person your world. The trick was to take what each could give you and build a world from it.

When you shut down the giving you shut down the receiving.

Nothing makes one feel so strong as a call for help.

Every man lives by exchanging.

Love is a strange commodity, because you can't import it if you don't also export it.

Art matters because it is the one true great connector in a world that seems to be very unconnected.

I shall die here. Every last inch of me shall perish. Except one. An inch. It's small and it's fragile and it's the only thing in the world worth having. we must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.

We believe that it takes a strong back and a soft front to face the world.

Our identity includes our natural world, how we move through it, how we interact with it and how it sustains us.

To barter and lose is better than not to go forth.

Even on the poorest streets people could be heard laughing. Some of these streets were completely dark, like black holes, and the laughter that came from who knows where was the only sign, the only beacon that kept residents and strangers from getting lost.

Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It's splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.

God has never deserted our people. Through the ages Jews have had to suffer, but through the ages they've gone on living, and the centuries of suffering have only made them stronger.

If you imagine that everything is an exchange, then we're supposed to just transact and walk away. If we haven't walked away and we still have a relationship, it's because there's a debt.

Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone