Best 29 quotes in «new england quotes» category

A postcard and I'm pining for New England. . .

Explaining the Jews in a Catholic school when you’re Irish is like having to explain your country’s foreign policy while on a vacation in France. You don’t know what you’re talking about and no matter what you say, they’re not going to like it anyway.

But worse, it was a new apartment. We both knew that, in New England, old was better. Old was cozy; old, like our farmhouse, like the Pudding, had magic and charm.

At least when I get on the Boston train I have a good chance of landing in the South Station And not in that part of the daily press which is reserved for victims of aviation.

Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston.

In spite of all that is said, and more especially written, about the crabbed New Englander, New Englanders, like all ordinary people, are nice. Their manner of proffering a favor is sometimes on the crusty side, but that is much more often diffidence than surliness.

Live Free or Die; Death is Not the Worst of Evils.

If we look back into history for the character of present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practised it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England, blamed persecution in the Roman church, but practised it against the Puritans: these found it wrong in the Bishops, but fell into the same practice themselves both here and in New England. [Letter to the London Packet, 3 June 1772]

In this swarm of cigarettes and dark sophistication they appeared here and there like figures from an allegory; or long-dead celebrants from some forgotten garden party

Most local cooks have two ideas about what to do with food. They either fry it, or else they make chowder out of it.

My affliction decided to join us, forcing me to push my toes on the floor as though I were trying to eject myself from the chair. I prayed she didn’t notice what the affliction was making me do. I half expected to be eaten alive or murdered and buried out back in the school yard. “I’m not afraid of you, ya know,” I said, although I was terrified of her. The words hurt her, but that wasn’t my intent. She turned her face and looked out the window into North Cliff Street. She knew what her face and twisted body looked like, and she probably knew what the kids said about her. It was probably an open wound for her and I had just tossed salt into it. I was instantly ashamed of what I done and tried to correct myself. I didn’t mean to be hurtful, because I knew what it was like to be ridiculed for something that was beyond one’s control, such as my affliction, and how it made me afraid to touch the chalk because the feel of chalk to people like me is overwhelming. If I had to write on the blackboard, I held the chalk with the cuff of my shirt and the class laughed. “You look good in a nun’s suit,” I said. It was a stupid thing to say, but I meant well by it. She looked down at the black robe as if she were seeing it for the first time.

New Englanders began the Revolution not to institute reforms and changes in the order of things, but to save the institutions and customs that already had become old and venerable with them; and were new only to a few stupid Englishmen a hundred and fifty years behind the times.

Only she who attempts the absurd can ever achieve the impossible.

On January 27, 1778, the -Articles of Confederation-, recently adopted by Congress, were debated here [Montague, Massachusetts]. It was 'voted to approve of the Articles, except the first clause,' giving Congress the power to declare peace and war. This it was resolved, 'belongs to the people.

...the air has that bracing autumnal bite so that all you want to do is bob for apples or hang a witch or something.

Springtime in Massachusetts is depressing for those who embrace a progressive view of history and experience. It does not gradually develop as spring is supposed to. Instead, the crocuses bloom and the grass grows, but the foliage is independent from the weather, which gets colder and colder and sadder and sadder until June when one day it becomes brutishly hot without warning...It was fitting, then, that the first people who chose to settle there were mentally suspect.

The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black-and-white landscape. ("The Triumph Of The Night")

The country is an archipelago of lakes,--the lake-country of New England.

There was a young lady from Gloucester Who complained that her parents both bossed her, So she ran off to Maine. Did her parents complain? Not at all -- they were glad to have lost her.

These steel monstrosities screamed night and day, blotted out the starlit skies and Northern Lights with flashing red strobes, slaughtered thousands of bats and entire flocks of birds banished tourism and wildlife, made people sick and drove them from their now-valueless homes.

When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning-rod, the clergy, both in England and America, with the enthusiastic support of George III, condemned it as an impious attempt to defeat the will of God. For, as all right-thinking people were aware, lightning is sent by God to punish impiety or some other grave sin—the virtuous are never struck by lightning. Therefore if God wants to strike any one, Benjamin Franklin [and his lightning-rod] ought not to defeat His design; indeed, to do so is helping criminals to escape. But God was equal to the occasion, if we are to believe the eminent Dr. Price, one of the leading divines of Boston. Lightning having been rendered ineffectual by the 'iron points invented by the sagacious Dr. Franklin,' Massachusetts was shaken by earthquakes, which Dr. Price perceived to be due to God's wrath at the 'iron points.' In a sermon on the subject he said, 'In Boston are more erected than elsewhere in New England, and Boston seems to be more dreadfully shaken. Oh! there is no getting out of the mighty hand of God.' Apparently, however, Providence gave up all hope of curing Boston of its wickedness, for, though lightning-rods became more and more common, earthquakes in Massachusetts have remained rare.

Withstanding the cold develops vigor for the relaxing days of spring and summer. Besides, in this matter as in many others, it is evident that nature abhors a quitter.

Continuity is one of the things I like about New England.

I'm not in the least Southern; I'm entirely New England.

The important point of this report [Montague, Massachusetts; July 7, 1774] may be summed up in six resolutions: 1. We approve of the plan for a Continental Congress September 1, at Philadelphia. 2. We urge the disuse of India teas and British goods. 3. We will act for the suppression of pedlers and petty chapmen (supposably vendors of dutiable wares). 4. And work to promote American manufacturing. 5. We ought to relieve Boston. 6. We appoint the 14th day of July, a day of humiliation and prayer.

We have been gradually finding out that there is more democracy in letting a committee or representative ten to details than in making everybody's business nobody's business.

What New England is, is a state of mind, a place where dry humor and perpetual disappointment blend to produce an ironic pessimism that folks from away find most perplexing

I grew up in the early '70s in New England.

The one great poem of New England is her Sunday.