Agnes Sligh Turnbull

The human soul, by once suffering as much as it is capable of, purchases a strange and terrible immunity to all the rest of life’s sorrows.

I think we foreshorten our own viewpoint if we consider any state of mind, or society, or government as final. Growth and change! We can’t get away from them.

Do you know that the tendrils of graft and corruption have become mighty interlacing roots so that even men who would like to be honest are tripped and trapped by them?

Burning logs can carry on quite a conversation! … Have you ever heard apple wood talking? It’s the most loquacious of all. You really can’t get a word in edgeways.

A country-bred man can always learn to get on with city people, but a town-bred fellah never gets the real hang of the country. You can put city polish on a man, but by golly, it seems you can’t ever rub it off him.

When the desire ain’t on me I don’t need help. When it is on me I don’t want any. See? Like the old fellah that never mended his roof. Said on a wet day he couldn’t do it and on a dry day it was as good as anybody’s.

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

I hate the irreverent rabble and keep them far from me.

Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand; so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any degree; only about as much as is used in the lowest kinds of poetry. Some penetration, accuracy, and coloring, will fit a man for the task, if he can give the application which is necessary.

I have had to learn that my voice has value. And if I don’t use it, what’s the point of being in the room?

We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.

Every woman wants to be first to someone sometime in her life and that desire is the explanation for many strange things women do.

Part of her mystery is how she is calm in the storm and anxious in the quiet.

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.

I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell – you see, I have friends in both places.

He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise.

The seven deadly sins… food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man’s neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted.

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t!

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.