Bertha Damon Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

May is fulfillment compounded with immediate expectation and ultimate hope. May is like the first rising of the curtain before the play, the first measures of the orchestral overture. No moment afterward comes up to that.

Bertha Damon
The self-assured porcupine, endearingly grotesque, waddles up the road in broad daylight. He looks as if he had slept in his rumpled spiky clothes, and he probably has.

Bertha Damon
It is tragic that some gifts have to be made so costly, so damaging to the giver that there remains no small part of the giver to go with the gift.

Bertha Damon
She had one of those frequent, but not spontaneous smiles that did for her face what artificial flowers do for some rooms. Smiles, somehow, were more used in those days; they were instruments, weapons, what not.

Bertha Damon
Getting what you go after is success; but liking it while you are getting it is happiness.

Bertha Damon
To hide your own crying was the Griswold way of feeling grief. To ignore another's crying, the Griswold way of curing it.

Bertha Damon
The process of weeding can be as beneficial to the gardener as to the garden. It gives scope to the aggressive instinct — what a satisfaction to pull up an enemy by the roots and throw him into a heap! And yet, paradoxically, weeding is the most peaceful of any outdoor task.

Bertha Damon
Grandma... had a great deal to do with the education of her granddaughters. In general she not so much trained as just shed herself upon us.

Bertha Damon
Humor was for her a kind of social salt; and salt not only adds savor, it preserves.

Bertha Damon
Since in modern times cruelty is bad form, it must cover itself; this it often does under the admired cloak of discipline.

Bertha Damon
Autumn is the best season in which to sniff, and to sniff for pleasure, for this is the season of universal pungency.

Bertha Damon
I believed, like many others, that country life is simple. Now I know that the only thing simple about it is the person who thinks it is going to be.

Bertha Damon
A quantity of snow in itself is not so wonderful; it is the combinations which snow makes with forms in the winter scene.

Bertha Damon
Little seedlings never flourish in the soil they have been given, be it ever so excellent, if they are continually pulled up to see if the roots are grateful yet.

Bertha Damon
Beauty that dies the soonest has the longest life. Because it cannot keep itself for a day, we keep it forever. Because it can have existence only in memory, we give it immortality there.

Bertha Damon
I have come to the conclusion that almost no one on earth is lazy. The truth is that the man you call lazy just doesn't want to do your kind of work; he wants to do his kind.

Bertha Damon
Children feel what their elders forget, our touching kinship with animals. To me a chipmunk was a far more real personality than Great-Uncle Aaron, and the mousehole gnawed in the lower left corner of the door to down cellar a more delightful habitation for the mind to contemplate than the parsonage.

Bertha Damon
Hospital rooms seem to have vastly more ceiling than any rooms people live in.

Bertha Damon
[Radishes] are the one amateur crop to be relied on. Many are sowed, but few are eaten, except those first prompt miraculous test cases which the gardener wipes on the seat of his overalls and eats on the spot, with no condiment but grit.

Bertha Damon
Spring never comes abruptly; it makes promises in a longer twilight or a day of warmer sunshine, and then takes them back in a dark week of storm. It gives presages — a thaw, a swelling of maple buds, a greening of grass, a flash of bird wing; then snow falls and winter returns. Again and again spring is here and not here. But fall comes in one day, and stays.

Bertha Damon
Grandma spent much time 'working in the garden.' She called it that, but it wasn't like work. It was a kind of formative being present, intensely aware — that combination of willing and of gloating, simultaneously, that is creation.

Bertha Damon