Best 36 quotes of Maud Hart Lovelace on MyQuotes

And yet, even as she spoke, she knew that she did not wish to come back. not to stay, not to live. She loved the little yellow cottage more than she loved any place on earth. but she was through with it except in her memories.

Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and hat, opened her book and forgot the world again.

Betsy. The great war is on but I hope ours is over. Please come home. Joe.

Come in early, so there'll be time to pop corn,' Mrs. Ray said. If she mentioned popping corn, they always came in early. So she usually mentioned it.

Do you girls have hope chests?' Lloyd asked. We certainly do.' I don't,' said Betsy. 'My husband and I are going to use paper plates and napkins.' Poor Joe!' Lucky Larry!

Good things come, but they're never perfect; are they? You have to twist them into something perfect.

In silence the three of them looked at the sunset and thought about God.

One strain could call up the quivering expectancy of Christmas Eve, childhood, joy and sadness, the lonely wonder of a star

People were always saying to Margaret, 'Well, Julia sings and Betsy writes. Now what is little Margaret going to do?' Margaret would smile politely, for she was very polite, but privately she stormed to Betsy with flashing eyes, 'I'm not going to do anything. I want to just live. Can't people just live?

She thought of the library, so shining white and new; the rows and rows of unread books; the bliss of unhurried sojourns there and of going out to a restaurant, alone, to eat.

She tried to act as though it were nothing to go to the library alone. But her happiness betrayed her. Her smile could not be restrained, and it spread from her tightly pressed mouth, to her round cheeks, almost to the hair ribbons tied in perky bows over her ears.

The most important part of religion isn't in any church. It's down in your own heart. Religion is in your thoughts, and in the way you act from day to day, in the way you treat other people. It's honesty, and unselfishness, and kindness. Especially kindness.

Then he kissed her. Betsy didn't believe in letting boys kiss you. She thought it was silly to be letting first this boy and then that one kiss you, when it didn't mean a thing. But it was wonderful when Joe Willard kissed her. And it did mean a thing.

The silence in the room had width, height, depth, mass and substance.

Was life always like that? she wondered. A game of hide and seek in which you only occasionally found the person you wanted to be?

We'll just have to find more flowers in the spring. That's when they bloom, tra la.

When there are boys you have to worry about how you look, and whether they like you, and why they like another girl better, and whether they're going to ask you to something or other. It's a strain.

You have two numbers in your age when you are ten. It's the beginning of growing up.

You might as well learn right now, you two, that the poorest guide you can have in life is what people will say.

After Commencement Day, the world!" Joe said. "With Betsy.

Betsy did not answer. She was a talker, her family always said, but sometimes when she most wanted to talk she couldn't say a word.

Betsy liked to read her stories aloud and she read them like an actress. She made her voice low and thrillingly deep. She made it shake with emotion. She laughed mockingly and sobbed wildly when the occasion required.

Betsy liked to talk. Her father always said she got it from her mother, and her mother always said she got it from her father. But whomever she got it from she was certainly a talker.

Betsy was so full of joy that she had to be alone. She went upstairs to her bedroom and sat down on Uncle Keith's trunk. Behind Tacy's house the sun had set. A wind had sprung up and the trees, their color dimmed, moved under a brooding sky. All the stories she had told Tacy and Tib seemed to be dancing in those trees, along with all the stories she planned to write some day and all the stories she would read at the library. Good stories. Great stories. The classics. Not Rena's novels.

Did he know that she was so dissatisfied with herself that she was always pretending to be different? Probably he did, and despised her for it. More than anyone she knew, Joe Willard was always, fearlessly, himself.

New things are easier to do than old familiar things when there's going to be a change," Betsy decided profoundly.

Say, you told me you thought Les Miserables was the greatest novel ever written. I think Vanity Fair is the greatest. Let's fight. - Joe Willard

She felt a little better about Leonard out here in the country. It was just being close to nature, she supposed. In the country you felt as you never could in town the return of spring after winter. You felt a sort of pulse in the earth which proved that nothing dies, that everything comes back in beauty. Leonard was coming back... in some place beautiful enough to pay him for leaving the world. God knew all about his music, too. He would use that music someplace.

The older I get the more mixed up life seems. When you're little, it's all so plain. It's all laid out like a game ready to play. You think you know exactly how it's going to go. But things happen...

They soon stopped being ten years old. But whatever age they were seemed to be exactly the right age for having fun.

Thoughts are such fleet magic things. Betsy's thoughts swept a wide arc while Uncle Keith read her poem aloud. She thought of Julia learning to sing with Mrs. Poppy. She thought of Tib learning to dance. She thought of herself and Tacy and Tib going into their 'teens. She even thought of Tom and Herbert and of how, by and by, they would be carrying her books and Tacy's and Tib's up the hill from high school.

Well, Betsy," he said, "your mother tells me that you are going to use Uncle Keith's trunk for a desk. That's fine. You need a desk. I've often noticed how much you like to write. The way you eat up those advertising tablets from the store! I never saw anything like it. I can't understand it though. I never write anything but checks myself. " "Bob!" said Mrs. Ray. "You wrote the most wonderful letters to me before we were married. I still have them, a big bundle of them. Every time I clean house I read them over and cry." "Cry, eh?" said Mr. Ray, grinning. "In spite of what your mother says, Betsy, if you have any talent for writing, it comes from family. Her brother Keith was mighty talented, and maybe you are too. Maybe you're going to be a writer." Betsy was silent, agreeably abashed. "But if you're going to be a writer," he went on, "you've got to read. Good books. Great books. The classics.

We're growing up and I don't like it," said Tacy, as they say at Heinz's later, drinking coffee.

We're growing up," Betsy said aloud. She wasn't even sure she liked it. But it happened, and then it wasn't irrevocable. There was nothing you could do about it except try and see that you grew up into the kind of human being you wanted to be. "I'd like to be a fine one," Betsy thought quickly and urgently.

What would life be like without her writing? Writing filled her life with beauty and mystery, gave it life...and promise.

You don't grow up, she reasoned now, until you begin to evaluate yourself, to recognize your good traits and acknowledge that you have a few faults.