Dorothy Gilman Quotations

She felt again that small shiver that occurred to her when events hinted at a destiny being played out, of unseen forces intervening.

People need dreams, there's as much nourishment in 'em as food.

... old clothes, old friends, old books. One needs constants in a traveling life.

What continues to astonish me about a garden is that you can walk past it in a hurry, see something wrong, stop to set it right, and emerge an hour or two later breathless, contented, and wondering what on earth happened.

It's when we're given choice that we sit with the gods and design ourselves.

A man from hell is not afraid of hot ashes.

Hell is more like boredom, or not having enough to do, and too much time to contemplate one's deficiencies.

Sometimes I think we're all tightrope walkers suspended on a wire two thousand feet in the air, and so long as we never look down we're okay, but some of us lose momentum and look down for a second and are never quite the same again: we know.

Perhaps we clutch at life only when we have never lived or trusted it. Then death seems the last and greatest defeat, the end of something never felt.

It's compassion that makes gods of us.

Everything matters terribly to children, you know, they're fresh and unformed ...

my rebelliousness went so deep that, faced with a can of asparagus that instructed me to open at this end, I always, stubbornly, opened it at the other.

... people misunderstood death, they died not of too little life but of too much life, that as the skin withered and the future grew short it was the past that took on flesh, until ultimately the sheer accumulation of experience and memory became too heavy to carry.

... both therapy and friendship possessed the common denominator of discovering a self ...

When we live with a memory we live with a corpse; the impact of the experience has changed us once but can never change us again.

We overlook how much in our lives is invisible; love, for instance; thought, God, the future, time, faith, hope and even the electricity that brings us light.

will anything but fanaticism make for change? Wisdom and compromise come later.

when a gourd is hollowed out it becomes empty and is of great use to the world because of its emptiness.

If something anticipated arrives too late it finds us numb, wrung out from waiting, and we feel - nothing at all. The best things arrive on time.

People need dreams, there's as much nourishment in them as food.

There are no happy endings there are only happy people.

The best things arrive on time.