Ruth Sawyer quotes

  • To be a good storyteller one must be gloriously alive. It is not possible to kindle fresh fires from burned-out embers. I have noticed that the best of the traditional storytellers whom I have heard have been those who live close to the heart of things-to the earth, the sea, wind and weather. They have been those who knew solitude, silence. They have been given unbroken time in which to feel deeply, to reach constantly for understanding. They have come to know the power of the spoken word. These storytellers have been sailors and peasants, wanderers and fisherman.
    -- Ruth Sawyer

    #Heart #Wind #Sea

  • Creative art is the power to be for a moment a flash of communication between God and man.
    -- Ruth Sawyer

    #Art #Communication #Men

  • whereas there are many people in the world who can give life to others, there are but few who can help others to possess it.
    -- Ruth Sawyer

    #Helping Others #People #Giving

  • One is so apt to cheapen a thing when one tries hastily to put it into words, and ever afterward it is never quite the same.
    -- Ruth Sawyer

    #Trying #Speech #Never Quit

  • Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.

  • May God so fill us today with the heart of Christ that we may glow with the divine fire of holy desire.

  • Could man be drunk for ever       With liquor, love, or fights, Lief should I rouse at morning       And lief lie down of nights. But men at whiles are sober       And think by fits and starts, And if they think, they fasten       Their hands upon their hearts.

  • His folly has not fellow Beneath the blue of day That gives to man or woman His heart and soul away.

  • Cats, no less liquid than their shadows, offer no angles to the wind. They slip, diminished, neat, through loopholes less than themselves.

  • What is this world? A mere curl of smoke for the wind to scatter.

  • ... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens--if we are unaware that women even have a history--we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.

  • For in the voyage of the heart, there is a freight of hatred, and the wind of wrath blows shrill.

  • Do you remember the time we met? The wind blew the snow about on the outside, the train moved, stopped, and then moved some more. It took us five hours to reach Tokyo, but I wasn't bored one bit. I didn't really get to hear so much about Nana. But I knew I would have loved... To hear what Nana had to say about herself. - Nana Komatsu

  • once upon a time all the rivers combined to protest against the action of the sea in making their waters salt. "When we come to you," sad they to the sea, "we are sweet and drinkable; but when once we have mingled with you, our waters become as briny and unpalatable as your own." The sea replied shortly, "Keep away from me, and you'll remain sweet.