170 quotes
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
North of Boston (1914)
Men work together, ... whether they work together or apart.
The little graveyard where my people are!
So small the window frames the whole of it.
North of Boston (1914)
It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling
To get adapted to my kind of fooling.
In the Clearing (1962)
Take care to sell your horse before he dies.
The art of life is passing losses on.
Steeple Bush (1947)
A dramatic necessity goes deep into the nature of the sentence. Sentences are not different enough to hold the attention unless they are dramatic.
Preface to A Way Out: A One-act Play (1929)
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
New Hampshire (1923)
Such was life in the Golden Gate:
Gold dusted all we drank and ate,
And I was one of the children told,
'We all must eat our peck of gold.
West-Running Brook (1928)
If one by one we counted people out
For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long
To get so we had no one left to live with.
For to be social is to be forgiving.
New Hampshire (1923)
Our life runs down in sending up the clock.
The brook runs down in sending up our life.
The sun runs down in sending up the brook.
And there is something sending up the sun.
West-Running Brook (1928)
Always fall in with what you're asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever's going. Not against: with.
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
A Boy's Will (1913)
Till we came to be
There was not a trace
Of a thinking race
Anywhere in space.
In the Clearing (1962)
The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be —
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.
A Further Range (1936)
But he sent her Good-by,
And said to be good,
And wear her red hood,
And look for skunk tracks
In the snow with an ax —
And do everything!
Mountain Interval (1916)
We've looked and looked, but after all where are we?
Do we know any better where we are,
And how it stands between the night tonight
And a man with a smoky lantern chimney?
How different from the way it ever stood?
New Hampshire (1923)
For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew.
The Figure a Poem Makes (1939)
I never dared be radical when young
For fear it would make me conservative when old.
A Further Range (1936)
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
Steeple Bush (1947)
It is only a moment here and a moment there that the greatest writer has. Some cognizance of the fact must be taken in your teaching.