Dorothy Gilman Quotations

... 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.