Mary Webb Quotations

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

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

Give me good digestion, Lord, And also something to digest; but where and how that something comes I leave to Thee, who knoweth best.

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

Fragrance is the voice of inanimate things.

Autumn is full of leave-taking. In September the swallows are chattering of destination and departure like a crowd of tourists.

To many women marriage is only this. It 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.

Autumn is full of leave-taking.

Every time I meet a tree, if I am truly awake, I stand in awe before it. I listen to its voice, a silent sermon moving me to the depths, touching my heart, and stirring up within my soul a yearning to give my all.

The well of Providence is deep. It's the buckets we bring to it that are small.

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

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

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

We are tomorrow's past.

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

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. ... The true anthologist has the greatest difficulty in finishing his book. There is always just one more, a new, delicious discovery.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

There is surely no more unselfish person than the anthologist. For while all we others are striving to ensure our own immortality with eagerness, beguilements, buffooneries, loud voices, 'the sound of battle and garments rolled in blood,' the anthologist is quietly ensuring the immortality of somebody else.

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.

Saddle your dreams before you ride em.