The Perennial Bachelor quotes

As she lay floating in the grey river that flows between sleeping and waking, Maggie Campion knew, without remembering why, that it was a happy day.

And when she opened her eyes, the sunlight falling on the carpet in stripes of pale warm gold, the warm buff walls, even the fat little buff potichomanie flagons with their crimson rosebuds, all held a secret happiness—what was it?

She was more like a boy than a girl, everyone said. She was always carrying hop-toads about in her hat, or tearing her petticoats climbing trees and sliding down the ice house roof.

She was sometimes as bold as brass and sometimes one crimson blush of shyness, and she had the strangest ways of showing people that she loved them⁠—boasting in front of them in a loud gruff voice, making awful faces, twisting one leg around the other, or standing on the sides of her feet.

Six-year-old May slept beside her in the big bed carved with oak-leaves and acorns, under the picture of the guardian angel hovering above the little brother and sister gathering wild flowers at the edge of the precipice.

Oh, how nice, how nice! She made little nestling motions, settling deeper on her sofa, letting comfort surround her softly.

She was all soft and smooth and round⁠—so round that she sometimes thought, but only thought, of drinking vinegar.

She lay there, stretching and stirring a little at first from sheer comfort, then growing motionless; heavy and soft and white, a lady made of white velvet and stuffed with down.

“But it’s a big place, and expensive to keep up.”

“Dearest Victor would wish us to stay,” said Mamma with placid finality. It was her answer to everything.

“Dearest Victor would wish it,” or “Dearest Victor wouldn’t,” and simply meant “I will” or “I won’t.”

Wellington Carter was being stupid at the store, breaking the candles and dropping the change on the floor—and before the candles all were burned he was being buried at Mount Pleasant with military honors.

Sorrow was the common state, and boys who had marched away to fife and drum came home by the streets of silence.

“Thank God, Victor is a baby!” Mamma cried, listening to the church bell tolling. “And after all the suffering this one has brought, surely, surely, there’ll never be another war!”

“No, Victor, you can’t be, you’re too little.”

Victor wept. He was young, but he had learned how to rule his women.

But, when he was elephant, he didn’t know what to do. He just stood still. So they gave up having a circus, and went to play house under the beech-tree.

Not it!” at the top of their lungs. They began a clamorous and confusing game. Victor stood and watched them, his blue eyes wide, his face solemn and excited. Presently he gave a little prancing jump.

He was like a lid that lifts on a boiling pot.

“Can you catch?” one boy shouted at him.

He thought of home, and the thought was too much for him.

He was like the small seaweed-colored fish that will swim back desperately to their seaweed, no matter how often they are taken away from it.

There only they are safe. There the seaweed, and the crabs, and the mollusks, and themselves, are all alike, mottled and streaked with the same olives and pale ambers.

Sympathy, servants, admiration, gowns—and he would do so much for Victor and the girls.

Her thoughts drifted here and there like butterflies, floating with the sure instinct of those practical insects to sweetness after sweetness.

He would do so much for Victor—that mattered more than anything. Her eyes grew moist with the tears of tenderness that came so easily. Darling, darling little boy! But he did need a father’s guidance, a man’s strong hand.

What is happening? What is this feeling that floods them both?

Two drops of water touch, and are one.

It was the most wonderful summer. The Sun said, “Lift up your hearts,” and the flowers answered, “We lift them up unto the Lord.”

When she was in his arms, he felt as if he would never dare let her go. Suppose he should lose her.

A bird lies in your hands, yours to keep for always. But open your hands and the bird is lost in the sky, and, if you wait forever, your hands will still be empty.

“Maggie—it won’t be so terribly long—”

What made the whole house feel so strange, trembling and alive? The banister seemed to quiver under her hand.

The ticking of the clock on the stairs sounded like water falling, drop by drop⁠—water that could never be gathered up again.

Cautiously, silently, she got up, avoided the squeaking board, went back into her room, and closed the door.

… things, the blue and silver star of beads on Papa’s red cloth watch-pocket, Aunt Priscilla’s small pear shaped tears that never stopped, the tufts of cotton in Martha’s ears, the tiny green-white spider on the black grapes Cousin Sam brought, with a queer bright clearness.

Everything had become brilliant, intense, and strange, like the reflections and colors in a soap bubble just before it breaks.

She sat by the window at the end of the third night, watching the sky and the river turn the faint silver of a moth’s wing. Just at dawn a light wind touched her cheek, gentle and comforting.

There were ferns of frost on the kitchen windows; the pump, to keep it from freezing, was wearing Mamma’s old red cloth opera cape with the cock feather collar, its handle sticking out like a sword.

Nothing was quite its ordinary self, magic had touched The Maples.

It was almost time to start for the station when she came in tears to May.

Carefully, so as not to break her fragile glass fingers, she tidied them. Then she sat in the window-seat, her eyes on the falling snow, her hands lying lightly in her lap.

She was empty, empty as the shell of a locust that still clings to a tree trunk; legs, eyes, body all there, but the bright soaring wings that were in it, the life that was in it, torn out and away.

And suddenly she ran after him, tore after him, tumbling down the stairs, leaving the hall door wide for the wind and the snow to enter, stepping on her skirt, stumbling, running through the snow in her thin slippers.

It was as if her heart had been broken open so that her brother could enter in completely. But Edward was there, too, would be there forever. No matter if she never saw him again, no matter what happened.

Could anything make her stop loving him? Can storms put out the stars?

She went back to the house, and in to the new life that still looked so much like the old.

Maggie had set her heart on Victor’s going to Harvard because Papa had gone there. And Victor wanted to go, too, while the going was still far away, while the mountains were distant waves of mist-blue, instead of steep grey rocks and slipping stones.

At home, planning to go, he had been all of Harvard; but when he got to Harvard he was nothing.

Those first homesick days! He would have run home to The Maples if he could, as he had run on his first day of school.

He sat in his small room looking as lost as if he were alone on a raft in the middle of the sea. From his window he saw a thin grey cat slowly stalk a sparrow; then a man came by calling bananas.

The sparrow flew away, the cat poured itself through a hole in a fence, the banana man’s cries grew fainter and were still.

At dusk he went out and bought a box of crackers. He could see that the other young men on the streets were all accustomed to the place, that everyone knew everyone else intimately.

And Victor, drunk with nervousness, bumped into them all, ran upstairs, forgot what he had come for, ran down again, and wished he had never been born.

The day was like an accordion. First it stretched out for ever so long, and then⁠—swish!⁠—it was folded up to almost nothing.

If he didn’t hurry, he wouldn’t be dressed by the time they came! Even if he did hurry, it was too late now.

… first beginning of spring, the soft boundless sky, the flowing wakening air, the sudden, sweet warmth of the sun, the smell of everything, that made her want to laugh and cry at the same time, not gently or sentimentally, but as hard as she could.

Spring is not gentle or sentimental, for all its pretty pink and white cloak of blossoming boughs.

The wet, new green in the woods, intense in the sunlight, is as fierce as a sword-thrust, flowers in the grass are as awful as stars in the sky. Spring is terrible and divine, tearing the earth wide open, tearing the children of earth.

The wet, new green in the woods, intense in the sunlight, is as fierce as a sword-thrust, flowers in the grass are as awful as stars in the sky.

Spring is terrible and divine, tearing the earth wide open, tearing the children of earth.

She really wanted to go to the wedding in Wilmington—not because Victor was going to be an usher, but just because she was bursting for some fun.

Maggie moved her head away from the palm sticking into the back of her neck.

Mercy, how the woman buzzed!

“ ‘Shoo fly! Don’t bother me!’ ”

Maggie went upstairs to the bedroom, empty except for heaps of cloaks, drifts of nubias, foothills of storm-boots, and huddled in a dark corner.

Her geraniums fell from her belt and lay on the floor beside her, as red as a pool of blood.

She felt as if she were bleeding to death. She had never really said goodbye in her heart to Edward. But now she knew that the footsteps she had listened to for so long would never reach her.

While we still feel that we are just entering the sea we look back, and how far we have come!

How far away are the seashells and sandcastles of childhood. We can see them, but we can’t go back to them. No matter how tired or frightened we are, we have to swim on out to sea.

While we still feel that we are just entering the sea we look back, and how far we have come! How far away are the seashells and sandcastles of childhood. We can see them, but we can’t go back to them.

No matter how tired or frightened we are, we have to swim on out to sea.

Forty-one years old! Maggie couldn’t believe it. She didn’t feel forty-one a bit! Of course, she was often tired now—she, who had never been tired. But she got up so early and went so hard all day.

“My, what a big bunch! Somebody must like someone, sure ’nuff!” Miss Snaith said, sniffing enviously. She wished Miss May would open her envelope—not that she was curious, just interested. But May took it and went upstairs to her room, humming and smelling her violets.

Behind her locked door she dropped the violets on the floor and ripped open the envelope.

There was a daub in red and green and yellow, a hideous sharp-nosed creature with a cat on her bony knees. “A Hopeless Old Maid,” the black letters said beneath the picture.

When her home had been hers, she had never been able to hold it—the leaves fell, sunsets faded, darkness drank up the river, everything changed and passed like flowing water.

But now that she had lost it it was hers forever, immortal.

Lily wanted dreadfully to go to the housewarming the Spears gave, when all the changes had been made. “It would hurt their feelings so if none of us came,” she thought.

when you bothered to put on your best stockings, silk to just below the knees, because it was Sunday; when you got up earlier than anyone else in the house, and started the fire and made griddlecakes for breakfast.

Dying⁠—dying. The word repeated itself to her, monotonous as the beat of waves.

“Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.”

Winter must come, and death. But the seed lives, and rises again from the dark earth, from the grave.

The only way to life is through the door of death.

She knelt, hiding her streaming face in her arms, shaken by terrible weeping.

Maggie hurried up the lawn, straining towards escape. The beech tree was the same, anyway. And as she looked at it the mist of strangeness lifted, blew away, she saw her home again.

Nothing was changed, really. Nothing was lost.

Childhood’s sky arched up from childhood’s river, exquisitely reassuring. Small, chunky sunset clouds filled the west, cobblestones from the golden streets. Red leaves fell about her in a sudden shower—the red of the wine and the blood of sacrifice.