Edgar Lee Masters Quotes

What makes most people comfortable is some sort of sense of nostalgia. I grew up in a small town, and I could count my friends on one hand, and I still live that way. I think I'll die in a small town. When I can't move my bones around a stage any more, you'll find me living in a place that's spread out and rural and spacious.

I think people live in the past and tend to look that way, because they drop off when they're happiest and most successful.

It's easy to impress me. I don't need a fancy party to be happy. Just good friends, good food, and good laughs. I'm happy. I'm satisfied. I'm content.

The fifties - they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy.

The happiest moments of my childhood were spent on my grandmother's front porch in Durham, N.C., or at her sister's farmhouse in Orange County, where chickens paraded outside the kitchen's screen door and hams were cured in the smokehouse.

For me, baseball just brings up a lot of nostalgic, happy feelings because I enjoyed it as a kid, and I liked being out there playing in the sun, and it was a simpler time for all of us.

My favorite thing to do is still to go back to Peoria, go to my cabin and hunt with the boys. This is a great lifestyle, don't get me wrong. But fun for me is going back with my buddies I grew up with.

I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.

A book of verses underneath the bough, A jug of wine, a loaf of bread-and thou.

I don't remember a lot of the good times from my days with the Truckers.

Most people go to ashrams or retreats to destress and rejuvenate themselves. But I come back to my roots, the place where I spent half my life. And when I return, I spend time in the farms, eating a stalk of sugarcane, driving a tractor, and chilling with childhood friends.

I'm doing what I've always wanted to do: being a mum, writing, living in the country, having a happy time.

I love playing with my dog and just sitting on the patio with people I don't get to see very often anymore. I'm a pretty simple gal.

I'm out there having as good a time as I did in the backyard since I was five-years-old.

There you'll find the place I love most in the world. The place where I grew thin from dreaming. My village, rising from the plain. Shaded with trees and leaves like a piggy bank filled with memories. You'll see why a person would want to live there forever. Dawn, morning, mid-day, night: all the same, except for the changes in the air. The air changes the color of things there. And life whirs by as quiet as a murmur...the pure murmuring of life.

Let's say I hope that I appeal to the more carefree times in a person's life rather than to his reasoning adulthood. I'd just like to be an image that reminds someone of joy rather than of the problems of the world.

My parents moved to Los Angeles when I was really young, but I spent every summer with my grandparents, and I'd stay with my grandfather on the farm in Longview. He was retired from the railroad, and he had a small farm with some cows and some pigs. I remember part of my youth was feeding hogs and plowing fields and stuff, so that's a part of me.

Life was just a tire swing. 'Jambalaya' was the only song I could sing. Blackberry pickin', eatin' fried chicken, And I never knew a thing about pain. Life was just a tire swing.

Aching familiar in a way that made me wish I was still eight. Eight was before death or divorce or heartbreak. Eight was just eight. Hot dogs and peanut butter, mosquito bites and splinters, bikes and boogie boards. Tangled hair, sunburned shoulders, Judy Blume, in bed by nine thirty.

I wanna tell the whole world about a friend of mine / This little light of mine, I'm feelin' let it shine / I'm feelin' take y'all back to them better times/ I'm feelin' talk about my mama if y'all don't mind

I have a house that I bought 55 years ago. It's warm in the winter; it's cool in the summer. It has everything I wanted, plus it has all kinds of good memories. Like my kids, I have good thoughts about that. I can't imagine living any better.

What do you miss about being alive?" The sound of my mom singing, a little off-key. The way my dad went to all my swim meets and I could hear his whistle when my head was underwater, even if he did yell at me afterward for not trying harder. I miss going to the library. I miss the smell of clothes fresh out of the dryer. I miss diving off the highest board and nailing the landing. I miss waffles" - p. 272.

How I'd love, love, love, to dance with my Father again.

I feel like writing about a time when I was probably, and think all of us are, the happiest before the obligations start in.

We can be content with simplicity because the deepest most satisfying delights God gives us through creation are free gifts from nature and from loving relationships with people. After your basic needs are met, accumulated money begins to diminish your capacity for these pleasures rather than increase them. Buying things contributes absolutely nothing to the heart's capacity for joy.