Margaret Lee Runbeck Quotes

61 Sourced Quotes

The protective coloration of the young is general brainlessness. So we soon learn to make silly sounds in order to pursue our thoughts in private.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
Words are sometimes the most expensive and dangerous luxuries between the generations.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
Prayers, I have no doubt, differ as widely as love-making or fun-making.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
The people in my house always think if you're talking on the telephone it is their chance to engage your other ear, without your being able to talk back.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
The simple remark was like a sharp knife splitting open a melon in one stroke... The words split open the future in a dazzling vision, showing seeds from which much trouble could grow.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
Memory is a slick politician who will support either side of the argument loyally.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
When half the world is still plagued by terror and distress, you stop guiltily sometimes in the midst of your house-laughter and wonder if you've a right to it. Ought any of us to laugh, until all of us can again, you ask yourself, sometimes.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
If work is not its own reward, there comes no other pay worth having.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
We are good friends because we never need forgive each other the gaucherie of eloquence.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
Learning is always rebellion... Every bit of new truth discovered is revolutionary to what was believed before.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
Miracles may be phosphorescent, so to speak; only to be seen in darkness.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
Nobody has ever written a juvenile book on 'How to win friends and influence people.' Children are born knowing.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
A child's business is an open yard, into which any passer-by may peer curiously. It is no house, not even a glass house. A child's reticence is a little white fence around her business, with a swinging, helpless gate through which grown-ups come in or go out, for there are no locks on your privacy.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
Silences make the real conversations between friends. Not the saying, but the never needing to say, is what counts.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
If prayers are going to be answered at all, human beings probably have to answer them for each other.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
One person never tells anything about another person. Only about herself.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
A good buyer has two-faced eyes that see everything wrong with merchandise before it's bought, and everything right with it when it's to be sold again.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
All prayers, whatever form they assume, are of profit to the man who utters them; of that I have become convinced. What might seem like only a weak outcry to one man may serve as the fulcrum of courage to another.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
There is nothing more fatal than to give before asking has come from the deepest level of consciousness. Too many times I have rushed into this moment and killed it by my eagerness. Now I wait until I am sure.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
There is no power on earth more formidable than the truth.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
I suppose it is the inexhaustible nature of us that we feel alive only while we search. Man must go on sparring with himself in excruciating unbalance, alive only when he is scintillating like an agitated needle on some huge instrument, tremulous between the agony of desiring and the lethargy of satiety.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
Giving is a necessity sometimes... more urgent, indeed, than having.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
Once you've loved a child, you love all children. You give away your love to one, and you find that by the giving you have made yourself an inexhaustible treasury.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
There is nothing that so harasses an architect giving birth to a house as the presence of the prospective owners.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
To succeed in anything, one always works a little harder than one feels possible.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
Regret without grief makes more intelligent discipline. Repentance of the intellect instead of the heart, is our aim; since the heart is a sensitive little instrument intended not for hammering nails, but for telling time forever.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
Children are wholesomely objective about their own faults. They wear their little selves turned inside out; the patches and seams have no privacy.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
The base from which all growth is predicated then, is in the future, not from the past. Growing is always into, not away from.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
He worshiped figures, and the laws of figures. They were the only constancy in the universe. Women might scream and fall silent in the snow. Houses might lift up wings of flame and fly into oblivion in a few mad hours. Men might starve and steal and starve again. But figures, untouched and inviolate, held their ineffable sanity.

Margaret Lee Runbeck