Fanny Fern Quotes

I am convinced that there are times in everybody's experience when there is so much to be done, that the only way to do it is to sit down and do nothing.

What a pity when editors review a woman's book, that they so often fall into the error of reviewing the woman instead.

To her, the name of father was another name for love.

Our domestic Napoleons, too many of them, give flattery, bonnets and bracelets to women, and everything else but - justice.

O, girls! set your affections on cats, poodles, parrots or lap-dogs; but let matrimony alone. It's the hardest way on earth to getting a living.

There are no little things. "Little things," so called, are the hinges of the universe.

I am getting sick of people. I am falling in love with things. They hold their tongues.

Uncles and aunts, and cousins, are all very well, and fathers and mothers are not to be despised; but a grandmother, at holiday time, is worth them all.

The term 'lady' has been so misused, that I like better the old-fashioned term, woman.

I hate the word proper. If you tell me a thing is not proper, I immediately feel the most rabid desire to go 'neck and heels' into it.

Hoary-headed old Winter, I have had enough of you!

The cream of enjoyment in this life is always impromptu. The chance walk; the unexpected visit; the unpremeditated journey; the unsought conversation or acquaintance.

Too much indulgence has ruined thousands of children; too much love not one.

To the Pilgrim Mothers, who not only had their full share of the hardships and privations of pioneer life but also had the Pilgrim Fathers to endure.

Show me an 'easy person,' and I will show you a selfish one. Good-natured he may be; why not? since the disastrous consequences of his 'easiness' are generally shouldered by other people.

Everything in the country, animate and inanimate, seems to whisper, be serene, be kind, be happy. We grow tolerant there unconsciously.

they who are not fastidious as to the means, seldom fail of securing the result they aim at.

Well, it is a humiliating reflection, that the straightest road to a man's heart is through his palate.

When a literary person's exhaustive work is over, the last thing he wishes to do is to talk books.

How strong sometimes is weakness!

Dear reader, true religion is not gloomy.

Never ask a favor until you are drawing your last breath; and never forget one.

Nowhere more than in New York does the contest between squalor and splendor so sharply present itself.

Experience is an excellent doctor, though he never had a diploma.

Hurry, drive and bustle ... Everybody looking out for number one, and caring little who jostled past, if their rights were not infringed.

Light hearts seldom keep company with heavy coffers.

Pity that gold should always bring with it the canker - covetousness.

Every father knows at once too much and too little about his own son.

I dare say you will try to make me believe that Editors are human. Now I deny that, for I myself have, in past days, had evidence to the contrary.

Why will parents use that expression? What right have you to have a favorite child?

Hotel life is about the same in every latitude.

One person is as good as another in New England, and better, too.

Blessed be sleep! We are all young then; we are all happy. Then our dead are living.

Advice is like a doctor's pills; how easily he gives them! how reluctantly he takes them when his turn comes!

adversity is so rough a teacher!

A little oil makes machinery work easy.

No crust so tough as the grudged bread of dependence.

She said it was beautiful to be loved, and that it made everything on earth look brighter.

I am convinced that there are times in everybody's experience when there is so much to be done that the only way to do it is to sit down and do nothing.

Never compel yourself to say words to which the heart yields no response.

Would a harsh word ever fall from lips which now breathed only love? Would the step whose lightest footfall now made her heart leap, ever sound in her ear like a death knell?