Lucy Larcom quotes

Whatever with the past has gone, The best is always yet to come.
- Lucy Larcom

A friend is a beloved mystery; dearest always because he is not ourself, and has something in him which it is impossible for us to fathom. If it were not so, friendship would lose its chief zest.
- Lucy Larcom

If the world seems cold to you, kindle fires to warm it.
- Lucy Larcom

What is the meaning of 'gossip?' Doesn't it originate with sympathy, an interest in one's neighbor, degenerating into idle curiosity and love of tattling? Which is worse, this habit, or keeping one's self so absorbed intellectually as to forget the sufferings and cares of others, to lose sympathy through having too much to think about?
- Lucy Larcom

It is the greatest of all mistakes to begin life with the expectation that it is going to be easy, or with the wish to have it so.
- Lucy Larcom

From the first opening of our eyes, it is the light that attracts us. We clutch aimlessly with our baby fingers at the gossamer-motes in the sunbeam, and we die reaching out after an ineffable blending of earthly and heavenly beauty which we shall never fully comprehend.
- Lucy Larcom

A friend is a beloved mystery; dearest always because he is not ourself, and has something in him which it is impossible for us to fathom. If it were not so, friendship would lose its chief zest.
- Lucy Larcom

Girls especially are fond of exchanging confidences with those whom they think they can trust; it is one of the most charming traits of a simple, earnest-hearted girlhood, and they are the happiest women who never lose it entirely.
- Lucy Larcom

The final renovation of all souls, their restoration to life in holiness and love, is certainly a hope of mine that is not without a strong infusion of confidence; but I dare not say it is a belief; because both reason and revelation have left it in deep mystery; and the expression of any such belief does not seem to me likely to help others much
- Lucy Larcom

Some of us must wait for the best human gifts until we come to heavenly places. Our natural desire for musical utterance is perhaps a prophecy that in a perfect world we shall all know how to sing.
- Lucy Larcom

A journal of the 'subjective' kind I have always thought foolish, as nurturing a morbid self -consciousness in the writer; and yet, alone so much as I am, it is well to have some sort of a ventilator from the interior.
- Lucy Larcom

I am willing to make any part of my life public, if it will help others.
- Lucy Larcom

O Mariner-soul, Thy quest is but begun, There are new worlds Forever to be won.
- Lucy Larcom

The curse of covetousness is that it destroys manhood by substituting money for character.
- Lucy Larcom

I call them by familiar names, As one by one draws nigh.
- Lucy Larcom

Our relatives form the natural setting of our childhood. We understand ourselves best and are best understood by others through the persons who came nearest to us in our earliest years.
- Lucy Larcom

God be thanked for the thinkers of good and noble thoughts! It wakes up all the best in ourselves, to come into close contact with others greater and better in every way than we are.
- Lucy Larcom

These blossoms, gathered in familiar paths, With dear companions now passed out of sight, Shall not be laid upon their graves.
- Lucy Larcom

Because its myriad glimmering plumes Like a great army's stir and wave; Because its golden billows blooms, The poor man's barren walks to lave: Because its sun-shaped blossoms show How souls receive the light of God, And unto earth give back that glow I thank him for the Goldenrod.
- Lucy Larcom

Whatever science and philosophy may do for mankind, the world can never outgrow its need of the simplicity that is in Christ.
- Lucy Larcom

I believe the best poetry of our times is growing too artistic; the study is too visible. If freedom and naturalness are lost out of poetry, everything worth having is lost.
- Lucy Larcom

We were not meant to mask ourselves before our fellow-beings, but to be, through our human forms, true and clear utterances of the spirit within. Since God gave us these bodies, they must have been given us as guides to Him and revealers of Him.
- Lucy Larcom

No one can feel more gratefully the charm of noble scenery, or the refreshment of escape into the unspoiled solitudes of nature, than the laborer at some close in-door employment.
- Lucy Larcom

What does cause depression of spirits? Heavy head and heavy heart, and no sufficient reason for either, that I know of.
- Lucy Larcom

To different minds, poetry may present different phases. To me, the reverent faith of the people I lived among, and their faithful everyday living, was poetry; blossoms and trees and blue shies were poetry. God himself was poetry.
- Lucy Larcom

Oh, her heart’s adrift with one On an endless voyage gone! Night and morning Hannah’s at the window binding shoes.
- Lucy Larcom

The beauty of work depends upon the way we meet it, whether we arm ourselves each morning to attack it as an enemy that must be vanquished before night comes-or whether we open our eyes with the sunrise to welcome it as an approaching friend who will keep us delightful company and who will make us feel at evening that the day was well worth its fatigue.
- Lucy Larcom

I like these plants that you call weeds Sedge, hardhack, mullein, yarrow, — That knit their roots and sow their seeds Where any grassy wheel-track leads Through country by-ways narrow.
- Lucy Larcom