Edith Schaeffer Quotes

I love the holidays on 'The Middle' because I feel like I'm getting that very traditional American holiday experience that I never had growing up.

I find that it's the simple things that remind you of family around the holidays.

Holidays have been commercialized. It has become about material things. But the holidays are about sharing stories and being in each other's presence.

The best gift I've ever gotten... My grandpa gave me a Polaroid camera when I was younger. It was awesome!

Like a lot of kids, I had a Superman cake or different theme cakes, but then I hit the age where I think my mom thought I was ready for the German chocolate cake that she makes for my dad. Just the sight of that, the taste of that frosting, just reminds me of being at home with my mom and my dad and my sister and my friends.

It was so strange. I knew that Josephine Baker had performed on the same stage but that night I felt it. Many of the same people who worked with Josephine Baker are still here. They know what they're doing. And that was a very comfortable feeling.

Green has always been my mom's favorite color. My father, aunt and I have gotten her jade, emerald, and peridot pieces over the years, and we always seem to be on the lookout.

My memories of Christmas, it was more about being around family.

When my mother was around, she would insist on celebrating my birthdays.

Christmas is a time for slipping into familiar patterns.

If you grow up with traditions in your family, it's always nice to be able to get home and have those moments.

I grew up with three little brothers. Every Christmas, we'd have piles of toy trucks and Lincoln Logs and G.I. Joes under the tree. Those were for them. For me? My No. 1 favorite present of all time: books. Two or three tall stacks of wonderful stories that I could lose myself in for weeks.

I find great joy in tradition, and, in fact, I seek it.

A film like Genevieve to my contemporaries is not a film made years ago, but last week or last year. They see me as I was then, not as I am now. I am the reassurance that they have not changed. In an upside down world, with all the rules being rewritten as the game goes on and spectators invading the pitch, it is good to feel that some things and some people seem to stay just as they were.

For children, Christmas is anticipation. For adults, Christmas is memory.

In this difficult era the most valuable commodity is the unfailing turn of the hours and how they retrieve for us the known harbor of yesterday.

Whatever people are doing, they're probably going to be doing it five years from now. You have your banker, your general store runner, the principal of the school, and things of that sort. It's nice to see that, and to get old with other people.

We always spend the summer together. My wife and kids, we always go back to Massachusetts and spend the summer there near where my wife and I both grew up. I wasn't willing to sacrifice the summer to go elsewhere.

The mother memories that are closest to my heart are the small gentle ones that I have carried over from the days of my childhood. They are not profound, but they have stayed with me through life, and when I am very old, they will still be near . . . Memories of mother drying my tears, reading aloud, cutting cookies and singing as she did, listening to prayers I said as I knelt with my forehead pressed against her knee, tucking me in bed and turning down the light. They have carried me through the years and given my life such a firm foundation that it does not rock beneath flood or tempest.

I'm old-fashioned beyond my years.

Once again St. Nicholas Day Has even come to our hideaway; It won't be quite as fun, I fear, As the happy day we had last year. Then we were hopeful, no reason to doubt That optimism would win the bout, And by the time this year came round, We'd all be free, and safe and sound. Still, let's not forget it's St. Nicholas Day, Though we've nothing left to give away. We'll have to find something else to do: So everyone please look in their shoe!

Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.

Late in the afternoon we passed a man on the shore fishing with a long birch pole.... The characteristics and pursuits of various ages and races of men are always existing in epitome in every neighborhood. The pleasures of my earliest youth have become the inheritance of other men. This man is still a fisher, and belongs to an era in which I myself have lived.

Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there's nothing like them!

It was as familiar to me as a song I'd been hearing my whole life, covered by various people but the basic tune the same.