Kate Douglas Wiggin Quotes

There is a kind of magicness about going far away and then coming back all changed.

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“The soul grows into lovely habits as easily as into ugly ones, and the moment a life begins to blossom into beautiful words and deeds, that moment a new standard of conduct is established, and your eager neighbors look to you for a continuous manifestation of the good cheer, the sympathy, the ready wit, the comradeship, or the inspiration, you once showed yourself capable of. Bear figs for a season or two, and the world outside the orchard is very unwilling you should bear thistles.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“Most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes, by dozens and hundreds. Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers, and sisters, aunts and cousins, but only one mother in the whole world.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“It is very funny, but you do not always have to see people to love them. Just think about it, and see if it isn't so.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

Miranda Sawyer had a heart, of course, but she had never used it for any other purpose than the pumping and circulating of blood.

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

There are certain narrow, umimaginative, and autocratic old people who seem to call out the most mischievous and sometimes the worst traits in children.

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“Please drop a note to the clerk of the weather, and have a good, rousing snow-storm
say on the twenty-second. None of your meek, gentle, nonsensical, shilly-shallying snow-storms; not the sort where the flakes float lazily down from the sky as if they didn't care whether they ever got here or not, and then melt away as soon as they touch the earth, but a regular business-like whizzing, whirring, blurring, cutting snow-storm, warranted to freeze and stay on!”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“A real Christmas baby was not to be lightly named.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful World,
With the wonderful water round you curled,
And the wonderful grass upon your breast,
World, you are beautifully drest!”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“As a matter of fact it required only a tolerable show of virtue for Peter to win encomiums at any time. He would brush his curly mop of hair away from his forehead, lift his eyes, part his lips, showing a row of tiny white teeth; then a dimple would appear in each cheek and a seraphic expression (wholly at variance with the facts) would overspread the baby face, whereupon the beholder ... would cry "Angel boy!" and kiss him. He was even kissed now, though he had done nothing at all but exist and be an enchanting personage, which is one of the injustices of a world where a large number of virtuous and well-behaved people go unkissed to their graves!”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“Oh, Kathleen!" sighed Nancy as the two went into the kitchen together. "Isn't mother the most interesting 'scolder' you ever listened to? I love to hear her do it, especially when somebody else is getting it. When it's I, I grow smaller and smaller, curling myself up like a little worm. Then when she has finished I squirm to the door and wriggle out. Other mothers say: 'If you don't, I shall tell your father!' 'Do as I tell you, and ask no questions.' 'I never heard of such behavior in my life!' 'Haven't you any sense of propriety?' 'If this happens again I shall have to do something desperate.' 'Leave the room at once,' and so on; but mother sets you to thinking."
"Mother doesn't really scold," Kathleen objected.
"No, but she shows you how wrong you are, just the same ...”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

[Julia Carey] had never, even when very young, experienced a desire to sit at the feet of superior wisdom, always greatly preferring a chair of her own. She seldom did wrong, in her own opinion, because the moment she entertained an idea it at once became right, her vanity serving as a pair of blinders to keep her from seeing the truth.

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

To let blessed babies go dangling and dawdling without names, for months and months, was enough to ruin them for life.

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

No whimpering, madam! You can't have the joys of motherhood without some of its pangs! Think of your blessings, and don't be a coward!-

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“You seem to have an uncommon knowledge of young people. May I ask if you are, or have been, a teacher?" "Oh, no!" Mrs. Carey remarked with a smile, "I am just a mother,
that's all! Good night.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“Hugh refused to leave the scene of the action. He seated himself on the top stair in the hall, banged his head against the railing a few times, just by way of uncorking the vials of his wrath, and then subsided into gloomy silence, waiting to declare war if more "first girl babies" were thrust upon a family already surfeited with that unnecessary article.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“We'll never speak of 'last times,' Gilly, or where would any of us be? We'll always think of 'next' times. I shall trust Nancy next time, and next time and next time, and keep on trusting till I can trust her forever!”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“The girl's eyes were soft and tender, and the heart within her stretched a little and grew - grew in sweetness and intuition and depth of feeling. It had looked into another heart, felt it beat, and heard it sigh; and that is how all hearts grow.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“Yes, Mr. Popham is a Methodist and I'm a Congregationalist, but I say let the children go where they like, so I always take them with me.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“She was fairly good at any kind of housework not demanding brains. Nobody could say why some of Ossian Popham's gifts of mind and conversation had not descended to his children, but though the son was not really stupid at practical work, Lallie Joy was in a perpetual state of coma.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“Nancy was more impulsive than industrious, more generous than wise, more plucky than prudent; she had none too much perseverance and no patience at all.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“I am not wise enough to say how much of all this squalor and wretchedness and hunger is the fault of the people themselves, how much of it belongs to circumstances and environment, how much is the result of past errors of government, how much is race, how much is religion. I only know that children should never be hungry, that there are ignorant human creatures to be taught how to live; and if it is a hard task, the sooner it is begun the better, both for teachers and pupils. It is comparatively easy to form opinions and devise remedies, when one knows the absolute truth of things; but it is so difficult to find the truth here, or at least there are so many and such different truths to weigh in the balance ...”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

Every child born into the world is a new thought of God, an ever-fresh and radiant possibility.

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“Maternal love, like an orange tree, buds and blossoms and bears at once. When a woman puts her finger for the first time into the tiny hand of her baby and feels that helpless clutch which tightens her very heartstrings, she is born again with her newborn child.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“Never miss a joy in this world of trouble-that's my theory! ...
Happiness, like mercy,is twice blest: it blesses those most
intimately associated with it and it blesses all those who see
it, hear it, touch it or breathe the same atmosphere.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

There is nothing so debilitating to a naturally weak sense of humor as selling tickets behind a grating ...

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

Lord, I do not ask that Thou shouldst give me wealth; only show me where it is, and I will attend to the rest.

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“Some folks mistakes all they see for all there is.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“To make my diary a little different I am going to call it a Thought Book ... I have thoughts that I never can use unlesss I write them down, for Aunt Miranda always says, Keep your thoughts to yourself.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“If you make children happy now, you will make them happy twenty years hence by the memory of it.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“Pictures made in childhood are painted in bright hues ...”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“One cannot see callers, answer the telephone, go to luncheons or dinners, visit the dentist or shoemaker, address charitable organizations in or from a bed; therefore a bed, in my experience, is simply bristling with ideas.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“The world is always a new plaything to children, while to the old it seems falling to pieces from sheer dryness. Everything loses its value with time, but it is not the fault of the fruit, but of the mouth and the tongue.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“It was not long after sunrise, and Stephen Waterman, fresh from his dip in the river, had scrambled up the hillside from the hut in the alder-bushes where he had made his morning toilet.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“The old stage coach was rumbling along the dusty road that runs from Maplewood to Riverboro. The day was as warm as midsummer, though it was only the middle of May, and Mr. Jeremiah Cobb was favoring the horses as much as possible, yet never losing sight of the fact that he carried the mail. The hills were many, and the reins lay loosely in his hands as he lolled back in his seat and extended one foot and leg luxuriously over the dashboard. His brimmed hat of worn felt was well pulled over his eyes, and revolved a quid of tobacco in his left cheek.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“When, all at once, you find you have something precious you only dimly suspected was to be yours, you almost wish it hadn't come so soon.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

If I haven't anything to write, I am just as anxious to 'take my pen in hand' as though I had a message to deliver, a cause to plead, or a problem to unfold. Nothing but writing rests me; only then do I seem completely myself!

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“You may have noted the fact that it is a person's virtues as often as his vices that make him difficult to live with.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“Father doesn't think very sudden, but he thinks awful strong.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“You can never prove God; you can only find Him!”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“The habit of generalizing from one particular, that mainstay of the cheap and obvious essayist, has rooted many fictions in the public eye. Nothing, for example can blot from my memory the profound, searching, and exhaustive analysis of a great nation which I learned in my small geography when I was a child, namely, 'The French are a gay and polite people fond of dancing and light wines.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“Why is it that the people with whom one loves to be silent are also the very ones with whom one loves to talk?”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

There are some who possess the magic touch, the infectious spirit of enthusiasm; who have the same effect as a beautiful morning that never reaches noon. Under this spell one's mind is braced, one's spirit recreated; one is ready for any adventure, even if it only be the doing of the next distasteful task light-heartedly.

— Kate Douglas Wiggin