(For notes on last year’s essays, click here.)
Some important lines…
…on nature:
Stage Mgr: “The morning star always gets wonderful bright the minute before it has to go—doesn’t it?”
Mr. Webb: “We’ve got a lot of pleasures of a kind here: we like the sun comin’ up over the mountain in the morning, and we all notice a good deal about the birds. We pay a lot of attention to them.”
Rebecca: “George, is the moon shining on
Emily: “I can’t work at all. The moonlight’s so terrible.”
Emily: “I just can’t sleep yet, Papa. The moonlight’s so won-derful.”
A Man Among the Dead: “A star’s mighty good company.”
Stage Mgr: “There are the stars, don’ their old crisscross journeys in the sky.”
…on society:
Stage Mgr: “Naturally, out in the country—all around—there’ve been lights on for some time, what with the milkin’s and so on. But town people sleep late.”
Stage Mgr: “In our town, we like to know the facts about everybody.”
Joe Crowell: “I think if a person starts out to be a teacher, she ought to stay one.”
Mr. Webb: “I guess we’re all hunting like everybody else for a way the diligent and sensible can rise to the top and the lazy and quarrelsome can sink to the bottom, But it ain’t easy to find. Meanwhile, we do all that we can to help those who can’t help themselves, and those that can we leave alone.”
Stage Mgr: “One man in ten thinks it’s a privilege to push his own lawnmower.”
Dr. Gibbs: (about Simon) “I don’t know how that’ll end; but there’s nothing we can do but just leave it alone.”
Stage Mgr: “Whenever you come near the human race, there’s layers and layers of nonsense.”
…on family:
Mrs. Webb: “As for me, I’d rather have my children healthy than bright.”
Mrs. Webb: “All my children have good features. I’d be ashamed if they hadn’t.”
Mrs. Webb: (to Emily) “You’re pretty enough for all normal purposes.”
Dr. Gibbs: (to George) “You eat her meals, and put on the clothes she keeps nice for you, and you run off and play baseball—like she’s some hired girl we keep around the house but that we don’t like very much.”
Stage Mgr: “It’s like one of those
…on money:
Mrs. Gibbs: (to Rebecca) “Well, dear, I think it’s a good thing to spend some (money) every now and then.”
Mrs. Gibbs: “If I could get the Doctor to take the money and go away someplace on a real trip, I’d sell it (the highboy) like that.”
…on time:
Stage Mgr: (about the time capsule) “So, people a thousand years from now, this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is the way we were: in our growing up and our marrying and our living and our dying.”
Stage Mgr: “Three years have gone by…Summers and winters have cracked the mountains a little bit more and the rains have brought down some of the dirt.”
Emily: (at her grave) “It seems thousands and thousands of years since I…”
A Man Among the Dead: “My boy, Joel, who knew the stars—he used to say it took millions of years for that speck o’ light to git to the earth. Don’t seem like a body could believe it, but that’s what he used to say—millions of years.”
…on Grover’s Corners:
Prof. Willard: “I may say it’s some of the oldest land in the world. We’re very proud of that.”
Mr. Webb: “Very ordinary town, if you ask me. Little better behaved than most. Probably a lot duller.”
Emily: “Grover’s Corners isn’t a very
important place when you think of all—
…the world:
Mrs. Gibbs: “It seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don’t talk in English and don’t even want to.”
Rebecca: (the address on the letter to Jane Crofut from her minister) “Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; The United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God…and the postman brought it just the same.”
Stage Mgr: Only this (planet) is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. The strain gets so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest.”
...on love:
Stage Mgr: “(Remember) the days when you were first in love; when you were like a person sleepwalking, and you didn’t quite see the street you were on, and you didn’t hear everything that was said to you.”
George: (to Emily) “I always thought about you as one of the chief people that I thought about.”
George: (to Emily) “I think that once you’ve found a person that you’re very fond of…I mean a person who’s fond of you too…well I think that’s just as important as college is, and even more so.”
…on death and eternity:
Stage Mgr: (at the graveyard) “Yes, an awful lot of sorrow has sort of quieted down up here.”
Stage Mgr: “We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars…everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with people.”
Stage Mgr: “(The Dead are) waitin’. They’re waitin’ for something they feel is comin’. Something important, and great. Aren’t they waitin’ for the eternal part in them to come out clear?”
…on life:
Mrs. Soames: “My, wasn’t life awful…and wonderful?”
Emily: “Live people don’t understand, do they? They’re sort of shut up in little boxes.”
Emily: “I never realized before how troubled and how…how in the dark live people are…From morning to night, that’s all they are: troubled.”
Mrs. Gibbs: (to Emily about reliving a day) “Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.”
Emily: “I can’t (keep reliving the day). I can’t go on. It goes too fast. We don’t have time to look at one another…So all that was going on and we never noticed.”
Emily: “Goodbye, world. Goodbye, Grover’s Corners…Mama and Papa. Goodbye to clocks ticking…and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths…and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you!”
Emily: “Do
any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?”
Stage Mgr: “No. The saints and poets, maybe—they do some.”
Simon: “Now
you know! That’s what it was to be alive.
To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on
the feelings of those…of those about you.
To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered
passion or another…Ignorance and blindness!”
Mrs. Gibbs: “Simon
Stimson, that ain’t the whole truth and you know it.”
…on marriage:
Stage Mgr: “Nature’s been pushing and contriving in other ways, too: a number of young people fell in love and got married.”
Stage Mgr: “Almost everybody in the world gets married—you know what I mean?”
Dr. Gibbs: (to Mrs. Gibbs) “When I saw you comin’ down that aisle I thought you were the prettiest girl I’d ever seen, but the only trouble was that I’d never seen you before. There I was in the Congregational Church marryin’ a total stranger.”
Mrs. Gibbs: “Weddings are perfectly awful things. Farces, that’s what they are.”
Mrs. Gibbs: “People are meant to go through life two by two. ‘Tain’t natural to be lonesome.”
Mr. Webb: “A man looks pretty small at a wedding, George. All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder making sure that the knot’s tied in a mighty public way…Don’t you misunderstand me, my boy: Marriage is a wonderful thing.”
Stage Mgr: “It’s like one of those European fellas said: every child born into the world is nature’s attempt to make a perfect human being.”
Mrs. Webb: “Oh, I’ve just got to say it: you know there’s something downright cruel about sending our girls into marriage this way (ignorant about sex).”
Mrs. Soames: “Don’t know why it is, but I always cry.”
Stage Mgr: “Once in a thousand times, it’s interesting.”