Myrtle Reed Quotations

A bird is joy incarnate.

There isn't a new sorrow in the world -- they're all old ones -- but we can all find new happiness if we look in the right way.

If we all tried to make other people's paths easy, our own feet would have a smooth even place to walk on.

A letter has distinct advantages. You can say all you want to say before the other person has a chance to put in a word.

One of the most interesting things in the world to me is the vast difference between what people say they are going to do, and what they actually do.

Love and hate always remember; it is only indifference that forgets.

If there's anythin' on earth that can be more tryin' than any kind of relative, I don't know what it is, but relatives by marriage comes first - easy.

One uncongenial guest can ruin a dinner more easily than a poor salad, and that is saying a great deal.

Home is a place where we all do as we please - usually regardless of the others.

The only way to win happiness is to give it. The more we give, the more we have.

I've just washed my hair and I can't do a thing with it!

Fortunately age does not affect literature. After a man is dead, he may continue in the business and often rank higher than his living competitors.

In every life there is a perfect moment, like a flash of sun. We can shape our days by that, if we will - before by faith, and afterward by memory.

A man likes to feel that he is loved, a woman likes to be told.

After the door of a woman's heart has once swung on its silent hinges, a man thinks he can prop it open with a brick and go away and leave it.

Love is an orchid which thrives principally on hot air.

Pedestals are always lonely.

There is always one way to make anybody do anything - the trouble is to find it.

It is possible for a spinster to be disappointed in lovers, but only the married are ever disappointed in love.

A real love letter is absolutely ridiculous to everyone except the writer and the recipient.

Did you ever read a love-letter that wasn't an evidence of idiocy - except your own?

The body grows by food and work, the mind by use, and the soul through joy and pain.

Gossip is the social mosquito.

Impermanence is the very essence of joy-the drop of bitterness that enables one to perceive the sweet.

Conceit is lovable and unconcealed ; vanity is supreme selfishness, usually hidden.

Silence and reserve will give anyone a reputation for wisdom.

When you borrow trouble you give your peace of mind as security.

Somewhere on this great world the sun is always shining, and it will sometimes shine on you.

It saves trouble to be conventional, for you're not always explaining things.

The river itself portrays humanity precisely, with its tortuous windings, its accumulation of driftwood, its unsuspected depths, and its crystalline shallows, singing in the Summer sun. Barriers may be built across its path, but they bring only power, as the conquering of an obstacle is always sure to do. Sometimes when the rocks and stone-clad hills loom large ahead, and eternity itself would be needed to carve a passage, there is an easy way around. The discovery of it makes the river sing with gladness and turns the murmurous deeps to living water, bright with ripples and foam.

Lots of people think they're charitable if they give away their old clothes and things they don't want.

It seems to take a lifetime for us to learn that wisdom consists largely in a graceful acceptance of things that do not immediately concern us.

Youth asks no greater privilege than to fight its own battles. It is mistaken kindness to shield - it weakens one in the years to come.

There is only one path which leads to the house of forgiveness - that of understanding.

A good forgettery is a happier possession than a good memory.

each separate flower has a magic all its own.

All we can do in this world is the thing that seems to us the best. We have no concern with the results, except as a guide for the future, and sometimes, years afterward, we see that what seemed like a bitter loss was, in reality, gain.

the world has been fair cruel if you've never known the love of a dog!

There is a great deal of trouble in this world which is not caused by people keeping their mouths shut.

Womankind suffers from three delusions: marriage will reform a man, a rejected lover is heartbroken for life, and if the other women were only out of the way, he would come back.

If we could only use other folks' experience, this here world would be heaven in about three generations, but we're so constructed that we never believe fire'll burn till we poke our own fingers into it to see. Other folks' scars don't go no ways at all toward convincin' us.

As if by magic, the love of the many comes with the love of the one.

it is bad manners to contradict a guest. You must never insult people in your own house - always go to theirs.

Marriage is the process by which a woman deprives herself of an escort.

The fine gifts of temperament and imagination which are essential to the production of true poetry are often accompanied by morbid sensibility. The soul capable of ecstasy and transport must pay its price in suffering; he who walks upon the heights must sometimes grovel in the dust.

No woman need fear the effect of absence upon the man who honestly loves her. The needle of the compass, regardless of intervening seas, points forever toward the north. Pitiful indeed is she who fails to be a magnet and blindly becomes a chain.

Sins of commission are far more productive of happiness than the sins of omission.

Those who have been made great have first suffered.

content is a matter of temperament rather than circumstance ...

... no matter how one's heart aches, one can do the necessary things and do them well.

when one has learned to wait patiently, one has learned to live.

Married and unmarried women waste a great deal of time in feeling sorry for each other.

I had thought, in my blindness, that the great things were the easiest to do, but now I see that drudgery is an inseparable part of everything worth while, and the more worth while it is, the more drudgery is involved.

The spirit in which one earns his daily bread means as much to his soul as the bread itself may mean to his body.

Nothing is bad which does not harm either you or someone else.

When the years bring wisdom, one learns to leave many problems to their own working out.

Three things I have longed to see ... The sea serpent, a white rhinoceros, and an unselfish man.

When things hurt us, we're merely on our way to another spiritual environment.

It all depends on the way you look at it. The point of view is everything in this world.

For the size of it, a check book is about the greatest convenience I know of.

Some women are born to be married, some achieve marriage, and others have marriage thrust upon them.

There are many people who consider love a dream, but they usually grow to think of marriage as the cold breakfast.

At twenty, men love woman; at thirty, a woman; and at forty, women.

Five golden years, Heart of Mine, have we walked the way of life together, and there is not an hour I would have changed; there is no moment when I would have you other than you have been. It is the fashion these days, I know, to say that love ends at the altar, but it is not so. You and I have found the old dream of the world divinely true. It is neither a poet's fancy nor a trick of the imagination, but a thing of fadeless and unending beauty.

Money may not be your best friend, but it's the quickest to act, and seems to be favorably recognized in more places than most friends are.

Not infrequently, when a man asks a woman to marry him, he means that he wants her to help him love himself, and if, blinded by her own feeling, she takes him for her captain, her pleasure craft becomes a pirate ship, the colours change to a black flag with a sinister sign, and her inevitable destiny is the coral reef.

I experienced the discomfort of those who have moved mentally, but are still clamped, physically, to the places they have moved from.

Marriage is the cold potato of love.

When we get civilised, I believe children will go by number until they get old enough to choose their own names.

marriage is a great strain upon love.

How strange it is that life must be nearly over, before one fully learns to live!

Before, you think of it as a permanent bond of happiness; later, you see that it is a yoke, borne unequally. You marry to keep love, but sometimes that is the surest way to lose it.

[On marriage:] Someone once said that it was like a crowded church - those outside were endeavouring to get in, and those inside were making violent efforts to get out.

Legislation may at times be disobeyed, but never law, for the breaking brings swift punishment of its own.

... sometimes, out of bitterness, the years distill forgiveness.

... the song of the world is all of love.

Death is the advertisement, at the end of an autobiography, wherein people discover its virtues.

Art, if it is art, will develop in whatever circumstances it is placed.

Making an issue of a little thing is one of the surest ways to spoil happiness.

Revolution is obstructed evolution.

Nothing in the world was ever built without a dream at the beginning.

when you can't see straight ahead, it's because you're about to turn a corner.

Of all the things that make for happiness, the love of books comes first. No matter how the world may have used us, sure solace lies there.

The conventions of society are all in the interests of morality. If you're conventional, you'll be good, in a negative sense, of course.

It is personal vanity of the most flagrant type which intrudes itself, unasked, into other people's affairs. There are few of us who do not feel capable of ordering the daily lives of others, down to the most minute detail.

A book, unlike any other friend, will wait, not only upon the hour but upon the mood.

Activity is a sovereign remedy for the blues.

The heart's seasons seldom coincide with the calendar. Who among us has not been made desolate beyond all words upon some golden day when the little creatures of the air and meadow were life incarnate, from sheer joy of living? Who among us has not come home, singing, when the streets were almost impassable with snow, or met a friend with a happy, smiling face, in the midst of a pouring rain?

On that first day when we look back, either happily or with remorse, to the stony ways over which we have traveled, losing concern for that part of the journey which is yet to come, we have grown old.

When a little pleasure has flashed for a moment against the dark, I have made that jewel mine. I have hundreds of them ... I call it my Necklace of Perfect Joy. When the world goes wrong, I have only to close my eyes and remember all the links in my chain, set with gems, some large and some small, but all beautiful with the beauty which never fades. It is all I can take with me when I go. My material possessions must stay behind, but my Necklace of Perfect Joy will bring me happiness to the end, when I put it on, to be nevermore unclasped.

The things that are ours cannot be given away, or taken away, or lost. We break our hearts, all of us, trying to keep things that do not belong to us — and to which we have no right.

I have a friend, physically magnificent, who combines within himself the intellect of a philosopher, the diplomacy of a statesman, the executive ability of the general of an army, the courtesy of a Chesterfield - and the emotions of a rabbit.

May our house always be too small to hold all of our friends.

The appointed thing comes at the appointed time in the appointed way.

Heart-aches are forgotten, tears lose their bitterness, and like a leaf of lavendar in a store of linen, so does Memory make life sweet.

it always seems to me as if the lavender was a little woman in a green dress, with a lavender bonnet and a white kerchief. She's one of those strong, sweet, wholesome people, who always rest you, and her sweetness lingers long after she goes away.

I've always thought my flowers had souls.

Anger is a better weapon than tears; a burr commands more respect than a sensitive plant.

When we come to the sundown road, we need all the love we have managed to take with us from the summit of the hill.

Silence always gives consent ...