Jean Webster - Daddy-Long-Legs (1912)

20 Sourced Quotes

View all Jean Webster Quotes
It isn't the great big pleasures that count the most; it's making a great deal out of the little ones—I've discovered the true secret of happiness, Daddy, and that is to live in the now. Not to be for ever regretting the past, or anticipating the future; but to get the most that you can out of this very instant.

Jean Webster
I must go to the laboratory and look into a little matter of acids and salts and alkalis. I've burned a hole as big as a plate in the front of my chemistry apron, with hydrochloric acid. If the theory worked, I ought to be able to neutralize that hole with good strong ammonia, oughtn't I?

Jean Webster
One can't help thinking, Daddy, what a colourless life a man is forced to lead, when one reflects that chiffon and Venetian point and hand embroidery and Irish crochet are to him mere empty words. Whereas a woman- whether she is interested in babies or microbes or husbands or poetry or servants or parallelograms or gardens or Plato or bridge- is fundamentally and always interested in clothes.

Jean Webster
Everybody likes a few surprises; it's a perfectly natural human craving.

Jean Webster
I am beginning chemistry, a most unusual study. I've never seen anything like it before. Molecules and Atoms are the material employed, but I'll be in a position to discuss them more definitely next month.

Jean Webster
Is it snowing where you are? All the world that I see from my tower is draped in white and the flakes are coming down as big as pop-corns. It's late afternoon - the sun is just setting (a cold yellow colour) behind some colder violet hills, and I am up in my window seat using the last light to write to you.

Jean Webster
The world is full of happiness, and plenty to go round, if you are only willing to take the kind that comes your way.

Jean Webster
Dear Daddy-Long-Legs, You never answered my question and it was very important. ARE YOU BALD?

Jean Webster
Oh, I'm developing a beautiful character! It droops a bit under cold and frost, but it does grow fast when the sun shines. That's the way with everybody. I don't agree with the theory that adversity and sorrow and disappointment develop moral strength. The happy people are the ones who are bubbling over with kindliness.

Jean Webster
The more I study men, the more I realize that they are nothing in the world but boys grown too big to be spankable.

Jean Webster
I think that the most necessary quality for any person to have is imagination. It makes people able to put themselves in other people's places. It makes them kind and sympathetic and understanding.

Jean Webster
I have an evening dress, pink mull over silk (I'm perfectly beautiful in that), and a blue church dress, and a dinner dress of red veiling with Oriental trimming (makes me look like a Gipsy), and another of rose-coloured challis, and a grey street suit, and an every-day dress for classes. That wouldn't be an awfully big wardrobe for Julia Rutledge Pendleton, perhaps, but for Jerusha Abbott - Oh, my!

Jean Webster
Be careful not to keep your eyes glued to detail. Stand far enough away to get a perspective of the whole.

Jean Webster
I have a terrible wanderthirst; the very sight of a map makes me want to put on my hat and take an umbrella and start. I shall see before I die the palms and temples of the South.

Jean Webster
She never lets ideas interrupt the easy flow of her conversation.

Jean Webster
It's much more entertaining to live books than to write them.

Jean Webster
I ate breakfast in the kitchen by candle-light, and then drove the five miles to the station through the most glorious October colouring. The sun came up on the way, and the swamp maples and dogwood glowed crimson and orange and the stone walls and cornfields sparkled with hoar frost; the air was keen and clear and full of promise. I knew something was going to happen.

Jean Webster
It's dreadful when two people's senses of humor are antagonistic. I don't believe there's any bridging that gulf!

Jean Webster
Her mother was a Rutherford. The family came over in the ark, and were connected by marriage with Henry the VIII. On her father's side they date back further than Adam. On the topmost branches of her family tree there's a superior breed of monkeys with very fine silky hair and extra long tails.

Jean Webster
I believe absolutely in my own free will and my own power to accomplish - and that is the belief that moves mountains.

Jean Webster