List of Rebecca Harding Davis Quotes

Crime, To The Man Of The Forties, Was An Alien Monstrous Terror.

We Don't Often Look Into These Unpleasant Details Of Our Great Struggle. We All Prefer To Think That Every Man Who Wore The Blue Or Gray Was A Philip Sidney At Heart.

To Preach A Sermon Or Edit A Newspaper Were The Two Things In Life Which I Always Felt I Could Do With Credit To Myself And Benefit To The World, If I Only Had The Chance.

The New Englander Landed On A Stony, Barren Tract, And A Large Share Of His Strength During Two Centuries Has Gone To Force A Living Out Of It. Hence He Has Come To Regard Economy - A Necessary Unpleasant Quality At Best - As The Chief Of Virtues. He Has Cultivated Habits Which Verge On Closeness In Dealing With Food, And With The Expression Of Feeling, And Even - His Enemies Think - With Feeling Itself.

The Only Hero Known To My Childhood Was Henry Clay.

Sitting By The Chimney Corner As We Grow Old, The Commonest Things Around Us Take On Live Meanings And Hint At The Difference Between These Driving Times And The Calm, Slow Moving Days When We Were Young.

Men And Women Thought And Did Noble And Mean Things That Would Have Been Impossible To Them Before Or After. A Man Cannot Drink Old Bourbon Long And Remain In His Normal Condition. We Did Not Drink Bourbon, But Blood.

... I Suppose That The Party Or Sect Which Is To Do Any Work In The World Must Breathe Its Own Peculiar Atmosphere, Speak Its Own Little Patois, And See But One Side Of The Question On Which It Fights.

But Remember, I Am No Politician, And No Seer Into Souls.

Before The Birth Of The New Woman The Country Was Not An Intellectual Desert, As She Is Apt To Suppose. There Were Teachers Of Thehighest Grade, And Libraries, And Countless Circles In Our Towns And Villages Of Scholarly, Leisurely Folk, Who Loved Books, And Music, And Nature, And Lived Much Apart With Them. The Mad Craze For Money, Which Clutches At Our Souls To-day As La Grippe Does At Our Bodies, Was Hardly Known Then.

For, After All, Put It As We May To Ourselves, We Are All Of Us From Birth To Death Guests At A Table Which We Did Not Spread.

One Sees That Dead, Vacant Look Steal Over The Rarest, Finest Of Women's Faces . . . In The Very Midst, It May Be, Of Their Warmest Summer's Day; And Then One Can Guess At The Secret Of Intolerable Solitude That Lies Hid Beneath The Delicate Laces . . .