Myrtle Reed Quotes

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.

Love is an orchid which thrives principally on hot air.

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.

Penetrate deeply in the secret existence of anyone about you, even of the man or woman whom you count happiest, and you will come upon things they spend all their efforts to hide. Fair as the exterior may be, if you go in, you will find bare places, heaps of rubbish that can never be taken away, cold hearths, desolate altars, and windows veiled with cobwebs.

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

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.

each separate flower has a magic all its own.

I've always thought my flowers had souls.

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.

Silence always gives consent.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

Silence and reserve will give anyone a reputation for wisdom.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Gossip is the social mosquito.

Pedestals are always lonely.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Marriage is the cold potato of love.