Dorothy Canfield Fisher Quotes

44 Sourced Quotes

The richness and endless variety of human relationships... that's what authors, even the finest and greatest, only succeed in hinting at. It's a hopeless business, like trying to dip up the ocean with a tea-spoon.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Compared with more emotional types, Vermonters seem to have few passions. But those they have are great and burning. The greatest is their conviction that without freedom human life is not worth living.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Professional psychologists seem to think that they are the only people who make sense out of human actions. The rest of us know that everybody tries to do just this. What else is gossip?

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
It was always insolent for a common man to take a chair in the presence of a lady — the word LADY, we may be sure, capitalized in her mind, and denoting not sex but rank.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Gossip…is only fiction produced by non-professionals.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Almost anything is enough to keep alive someone who wishes nothing for himself but time to write music.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Help that is not positively necessary is a hindrance to a growing organism.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Perhaps all this modern ferment of what's known as 'social conscience' or 'civic responsibility' isn't a result of the sense of duty, but of the old, old craving for beauty.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
You can't wish a body any worse luck than to get what he wants.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Don't let anything make you believe that there are not as many decent men in the world as women, and they're just as decent. Life isn't worth living unless you know that — and it's true.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
There's no such thing as luck. Nothing ever just happens to anybody.... nothing can really happen to a person till he lets it happen.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Mamma was a crackerjack of a business woman. The kind that'd make money if you let her down a well.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
For they were undertaking a hazardous feat compared to which hunting big game or living among hostile savages is sport for children. They were moving from one social class to the one above it.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher
The matter was that never before had [Betsy] known what she was doing in school. She had always thought she was there to pass from one grade to another, and she was ever so startled to get a glimpse of the fact that she was there to learn how to use her mind, so she could take care of herself when she came to be grown up.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher