Martha Ostenso Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

Ah, life, life, how madly, how cruelly it raced along your pulses!

Martha Ostenso
The wild geese were passing over - passing over the haunts of man in their remote seeking toward the swamps of the south. They marked the beginning and the end of the period of growth.

Martha Ostenso
A sickness... defines margins, crystallizes the shape of things.

Martha Ostenso
It was a sly trick of God's to give a man work to do - it kept him from asking questions that God couldn't answer.

Martha Ostenso
A man can break God's laws and be forgiven. That's what they teach us. But when he breaks Nature's laws, there's no forgiveness - and there's no escape. Sooner or later he pays the penalty, or his children pay it - or his children's children. It doesn't matter much. It must be paid.

Martha Ostenso
Time, designing slowly, swiftly; Time, destroying slowly, swiftly; Time holding, possessing the earth in its tender indifference.

Martha Ostenso
Growing old was simply a process of drawing closer to that ultimate independence called death.

Martha Ostenso
I don't see as it matters much how well you mean if it's harm you're doin'...

Martha Ostenso
It's remarkable - most remarkable, the way these people manage, from time to time, a tragedy or a near-tragedy to break the even tenor of their ways,' said Mr. Tingley, in a tone of half-humorous superiority, by which he considered that he distinguished himself, subtly and inoffensively, from 'these people.

Martha Ostenso
The snow again. White, white net of beauty, net of dream, trapping the earth, trapping the helpless heart of life...

Martha Ostenso
The lush green of the fields became a rich gold that swayed sturdily under the wind and fell at last before the hands of the reapers.

Martha Ostenso
There's precious little comes of telling people what they don't want to hear...

Martha Ostenso
By mid-morning a rain as fine as silk spills was weaving over the lake.

Martha Ostenso
Whatever misfortune came, he was always able to meet it by refusing to recognize it for what it was.

Martha Ostenso
Listen — man is a child of Nature. When he turns against his mother — he's done! He may not find out about it right away, but he will.

Martha Ostenso
Once a man had thrust his hands into the soil and knew the grit of it between his teeth, he felt something rise within him that was not of his day or generation, but had persisted through birth and death from a time beyond recall.

Martha Ostenso
But one had to go back to the beginning of things, always. Trace the thread of life — find the knot — untangle it.

Martha Ostenso
There is too much doing — too little being! When we begin to get strenuous, life begins to grow intolerable.

Martha Ostenso
You have stirred the soil with your plow, my friend. It will never be the same again.

Martha Ostenso
The curtain fluttered primly in the wind, like the short skirt of a little girl.

Martha Ostenso
There was nothing so real on the prairie as winter, nothing so memorable.

Martha Ostenso
Across the lake now, beyond the squat turtleback of Spite Island, rose the sun, a vast, wet, ominious ruby.

Martha Ostenso
Thunder moaned low in the southwest, as out of the heart of some forlorn, purple sea whose tided agony, creeping forward, creeping and spreading, struck at last with a coil of livid foam upon the last headland spur of sunset.

Martha Ostenso