Mary Webb Quotes

29 Sourced Quotes

If you stop to be kind, you must swerve often from your path.

Mary Webb
The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memoried glances and it's murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

Mary Webb
Nature's music is never over; her silences are pauses, not conclusions.

Mary Webb
There is usually no dreamer so unworldly as the anthologist. He wanders in a vast garden, lost in wonder, unable to decide often between flowers of equal loveliness.

Mary Webb
No accident of environment or circumstance need cut us off from nature.... It does not matter how shut in we are. Opportunity for wide experience is of small acccount in this as in other things; it is depth that brings understanding and life.

Mary Webb
But when you dwell in a house you mislike, you will look out of a window a deal more than those that are content with their dwelling.

Mary Webb
Insects are the artists of fragrance; they have a genius for it; there seems to be some affinity between the tenuity of their being and this most refined of the sense-impressions.

Mary Webb
The love of nature is a passion for those in whom it once lodges. It can never be quenched. It cannot change. It is a furious, burning, physical greed, as well as a state of mystical exaltation. It will have its own.

Mary Webb
Love unspoken is the most tremendous force in the world. One is amazed at the way in which people waste their time making speeches, agitating, praying, even. They might save their breath. The great lovers of the world, in silence, rule the world.

Mary Webb
The more anybody wants a thing, the more they do think others want it.

Mary Webb
If you know much about your work - why you work, how you work, your aims - you are probably not a poet.

Mary Webb
It is the way of lovers to think that none can bless or succour their love but their own selves. And there is a touch of truth in it, maybe more than a touch.

Mary Webb
Love was like that — a lot of coloured threads, and one master-thread of pure gold.

Mary Webb
To many women marriage is... merely a physical change impinging on their ordinary nature, leaving their mentality untouched, their self-possession intact. They are not burnt by even the red fire of physical passion – far less by the white fire of love.

Mary Webb
For the more a soul conforms to the sanity of others, the more does it become insane.

Mary Webb
That vivid present of theirs, how faint it grows! The past is only the present become invisible and mute, and because it is invisible and mute, its memoried glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are to-morrow's past.

Mary Webb
For the world is founded and built up on death, and the reality of death is neither to be questioned nor feared. Death is a dark dream, but it is not a nightmare. It is mankind's lack of pity, mankind's fatal propensity for torture, that is the nightmare.

Mary Webb
We are all as full of echoes as a rocky wood — echoes of the past, reflex echoes of the future, and echoes of the soil (these last reverberating through our filmiest dreams, like the sound of thunder in a blossoming orchard).

Mary Webb
I'd laboured over it a long while, and labour brings a thing near the heart's core.

Mary Webb
I've thought since that when folk grumble about this and that and be not happy, it is not the fault of creation, that is like a vast mere full of good, but it is the fault of their bucket's smallness.

Mary Webb
She had the egoism that is more selfless than most people's altruism — the divine egoism that is genius.

Mary Webb
It's the folk that depend on us for this and for the other that we most do miss.

Mary Webb
Who can say which is the greater sign of creative power, the sun with its planet system swinging with governed impetus to some incalculable end, or the gold sallow catkin with its flashing system of little flies?

Mary Webb
Green is the fresh emblem of well-founded hopes. In blue the spirit can wander, but in green it can rest.

Mary Webb
I love you already, and if these things be done in the dry tree, what shall be done in the green?

Mary Webb
She had so deep a kinship with the trees, so intuitive a sympathy with leaf and flower, that it seemed as if the blood in her veins was not slow-moving human blood, but volatile sap.

Mary Webb
So when folk tell me of this great man and that great man, I think to myself. Who was stinted of joy for his glory? How many old folk and children did his coach wheels go over? What bridal lacked his song, and what mourner his tears, that he found time to climb so high?

Mary Webb
She had for so many years been trying to be like other people, that she was now like nothing in heaven or earth.

Mary Webb
It made me gladsome to be getting some education, it being like a big window opening.

Mary Webb