Nathaniel Parker Willis Quotations

Like Melrose Abbey, large cities should especially be viewed by moonlight.

The rain is playing its soft pleasant tune fitfully on the skylight, and the shade of the fast-flying clouds across my book passed with delicate change.

Maturity is most rapid in the low latitudes, where pineapples and women most do thrive.

Gentleness is the great point to be obtained in the study of manners.

Nature has thrown a veil of modest beauty over maidenhood and moss-roses.

Pitch a lucky man into the Nile, says the Arabian proverb, and he will come up with a fish in his mouth!

We may believe that we shall know each other's forms hereafter; and in the bright fields of the better land call the lost dead to us.

There is no divining-rod whose dip shall tell us at twenty what we shall most relish at thirty.

If e'er I win a parting token, 'Tis something that has lost its power-- A chain that has been used and broken, A ruin'd glove, a faded flower; Something that makes my pleasure less, Something that means--forgetfulness.

There is to me a daintiness about early flowers that touches me like poetry. They blow out with such a simple loveliness among the common herbs of pastures, and breathe their lives so unobtrusively, like hearts whose beatings are too gentle for the world.