New England Quotes

“If we look back into history for the character of present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practised it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England, blamed persecution in the Roman church, but practised it against the Puritans: these found it wrong in the Bishops, but fell into the same practice themselves both here and in New England.

[Letter to the London Packet, 3 June 1772]”
― ben franklin, The Life and Letters of Benjamin Franklin

“What New England is, is a state of mind, a place where dry humor and perpetual disappointment blend to produce an ironic pessimism that folks from away find most perplexing”
― Willem Lange

“When the cold comes to New England it arrives in sheets of sleet and ice. In December, the wind wraps itself around bare trees and twists in between husbands and wives asleep in their beds. It shakes the shingles from the roofs and sifts through cracks in the plaster. The only green things left are the holly bushes and the old boxwood hedges in the village, and these are often painted white with snow. Chipmunks and weasels come to nest in basements and barns; owls find their way into attics. At night,the dark is blue and bluer still, as sapphire of night.”
― Alice Hoffman, Here on Earth

“If you don't like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.”
― Mark Twain

“I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!”
― William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

“A small and sinister snow seems to be coming down relentlessly at present. The radio says it is eventually going to be sleet and rain, but I don't think so; I think it is just going to go on and on, coming down, until the whole world...etc. It has that look.”
― Edward Gorey, Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer

“Live Free or Die; Death is Not the Worst of Evils.”
― John Stark

“Poor dull Concord. Nothing colorful has come through here since the Redcoats.”
― Louisa May Alcott

“Withstanding the cold develops vigor for the relaxing days of spring and summer. Besides, in this matter as in many others, it is evident that nature abhors a quitter.”
― Arthur C. Crandall, New England Joke Lore: The Tonic of Yankee Humor

“At least when I get on the Boston train I have a good chance of landing in the South Station
And not in that part of the daily press which is reserved for victims of aviation.”
― Ogden Nash, Hard Lines

“There was a young lady from Gloucester
Who complained that her parents both bossed her,
So she ran off to Maine.
Did her parents complain?
Not at all -- they were glad to have lost her.”
― John Ciardi, The Hopeful Trout and Other Limericks

“All praise to winter, then, was Henry's feeling. Let others have their sultry luxuries. How full of creative genius was the air in which these snow-crystals were generated. He could hardly have marveled more if real stars had fallen and lodged on his coat. What a world to live in, where myriads of these little discs, so beautiful to the most prying eye, were whirled down on every traveler's coat, on the restless squirrel's fur and on the far-stretching fields and forests, the wooded dells and mountain-tops,--these glorious spangles, the sweepings of heaven's floor.”
― Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865

“The “Howard” in the entry had to be Howard Phillips Lovecraft, that twentieth-century puritanic Poe from Providence, with his regrettable but undeniable loathing of the immigrant swarms he felt were threatening the traditions and monuments of his beloved New England and the whole Eastern seaboard. (And hadn’t Lovecraft done some ghost-writing for a man with a name like Castries? Caster? Carswell?)”
― Fritz Leiber, Our Lady of Darkness

“It has often been said that the New World is deficient in the elements of poetry and romance ; that its bards must of necessity linger over the classic ruins of other lands; and draw their sketches of character from foreign sources, and paint Nature under the soft beauty of an Eastern sky. On the contrary, New England is full of Romance....we have mountains pillaring a sky as blue as that which bends over classic Olympus; streams as bright and beautiful as those of Greece and Italy, and forests richer and nobler than those which of old were haunted by Sylph and Dryad.”
― John Greenleaf Whittier

“She felt that her memories had turned to muscle and been stretched over her bones so that she couldn’t move without them. It had gotten so there was nothing in her future. Only a series of reactions born from her past.”
― Ian Pisarcik, Before Familiar Woods

“Parents in the Northeast sometimes invoked the name of Andrew Jackson to frighten misbehaving children.”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“...Saygıdeğer Bede, kuyrukluyıldızların "krallıklarda devrimler çıkacağına, vebaya, savaşa, rüzgâra ya da sıcağa alamet" olduğunu söylemişti. John Knox kuyrukluyıldızlara tanrısal öfkenin kanıtları gözüyle bakar, başka İskoç Protestanları ise bunların, "Katoliklerin kökünü kazıtması için krala bir ihtar" olduğunu düşünürlerdi. Kuyrukluyıldızlar yönünden Amerika, özellikle de New England haklı olarak ilgi çekici bir yerdir. 1652 yılında, tam ünlü Mr. Cotton'un hastalandığı sırada bir kuyrukluyıldız görülmüş ve o ölünce kaybolmuştu. Aradan on yıl bile geçmeden, Boston şehrinin günahkâr halkına, "şehvetperestlikten ve sarhoşluk yoluyla, yeni moda elbiseler giymek yoluyla Tanrının salih mahlukatına karşı küfürde bulunmaktan" vazgeçmelerini ihtar için, bir kuyrukluyıldız göründü...”
― Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays

“Spring was madness in New England, all the world cone to love at once.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Rules of Magic

“Sometimes, the easy thing comes cloaked in the guise of what is right.”
― John Casey

“Ah, New England. An amalgam of picket fences and crumbling bricks; Ivy League schools and dropped Rs; social tolerance and the Salem witch trials, Henry David Thoreau and Stephen King, P-town rainbows and mill-town rust; Norman Rockwell and Aerosmith; lobster and Moxie; plus the simmering aromas of a million melting pot cuisines originally brought here by immigrants from everywhere else searching for new ways to live.

It’s a place where rapidly-growing progressive cities full of the ‘wicked smaaht’ coexist alongside blight-inflicted Industrial Revolution landscapes full of the ‘wicked poor’. A place of forested mountains, roaring rivers, crystalline lakes, urban sprawl, and a trillion dollar stores. A place of seasonal tourism beach towns where the wild, rank scent of squishy seaweed casts its cryptic spell along the vast and spindrift-misted seacoast, while the polished yachts of the elite glisten like rare jewels on the horizon, just out of reach.

Where there are fiery autumn hues and leaves that need raking. Powder snow ski slopes and icy windshields that need scraping. Crisp daffodil mornings and mud season. Beach cottage bliss and endless miles of soul-sucking summer traffic .

Perceived together, the dissonant nuances of New England stir the imagination in compelling and chromatic whorls.”
― Eric J. Taubert

“We dare not be original; our American Pine must be cut to the trim pattern of the English Yew, though the Pine bleed at every clip. This poet tunes his lyre at the harp of Goethe, Milton, Pope, or Tennyson. His songs might better be sung on the Rhine than the Kennebec. They are not American in form or feeling; they have not the breath of our air; the smell of our ground is not in them. Hence our poet seems cold and poor. He loves the old mythology; talks about Pluto—the Greek devil,—— the Fates and Furies—witches of old time in Greece,—-but would blush to use our mythology, or breathe the name in verse of our Devil, or our own Witches, lest he should be thought to believe what he wrote. The mother and sisters, who with many a pinch and pain sent the hopeful boyto college, must turn over the Classical Dictionary before they can find out what the youth would be at in his rhymes. Our Poet is not deep enough to see that Aphrodite came from the ordinary waters, that Homer only hitched into rhythm and furnished the accomplishment of verse to street talk, nursery tales, and old men’s gossip, in the Ionian towns; he thinks what is common is unclean. So he sings of Corinth and Athens, which he never saw, but has not a word to say of Boston, and Fall River, and Baltimore, and New York, which are just as meet for song. He raves of Thermopylae and
Marathon, with never a word for Lexington and Bunkerhill, for Cowpens, and Lundy’s Lane, and Bemis’s Heights. He loves to tell of the Ilyssus, of “ smooth sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds,” yet sings not of the Petapsco, the Susquehannah, the Aroostook, and the Willimantick. He prates of the narcissus, and the daisy, never of American dandelions andbue-eyed grass; he dwells on the lark and the nightingale, but has not a thought for the brown thrasher and the bobolink, who every morning in June rain down such showers of melody on his affected head. What a lesson Burns teaches us addressing his “rough bur thistle,” his daisy, “wee crimson tippit thing,” and finding marvellous poetry in the mouse whose nest his plough turned over! Nay, how beautifully has even our sweet Poet sung of our own Green river, our waterfowl,of the blue and fringed gentian, the glory of autumnal days.”
― Massachussetts Quarterly Review, 1849

“Eschew the skylark and the nightingale, birds that Audubon never found. A national literature ought to be built, as the robin builds its nest, out of the twigs and straws of one's native meadows.”
― Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England

“By 1937, every British trawler had a wireless, electricity, and an echometer - the forerunner of sonar. If getting into fishing had required the kind of capital in past centuries that it cost in the twentieth century, cod would never have built a nation of middle-class, self-made entrepreneurs in New England.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“...grand oaks, maples, and chestnuts muscle in on one another, flared in their autumn robes; a motley conflagration under the dazzling mid-October sun. We are in the middle of a beautiful nowhere, digging into sprawling hinterlands, into territories of wild earth.

The rolling, winding roads away from Bangor took us through towns with names like Charleston, Dover-Foxcroft, Monson, and Shirley, all with their own quaint, beautifully cinematic set dressing. It was like each was curated from grange hall flea markets and movie sets rife with small-town Americana. Stoic stone war memorials. American flags. Whitewashed, chipping town hall buildings from other centuries. Church bell towers in the actual process of tolling, gonging, calling. To me, the sound was ominous in a remote sort of way, unnamable.”
― Katie Lattari, Dark Things I Adore

“I have started to spend my Fridays
playing tennis with a boy from my class,
and he said we would only do it as long as the weather permitted.
I have started looking forward to Fridays.
It is getting colder everyday,
this is the worst part of living in New England:
how quickly the seasons change.”
― Belle Townsend

“My roommate, Remi, was a kid from Haiti who was at Saint Ignatius on a scholarship. The day I moved into the dorm he was losing his mind because the leaves on some of the maple trees on campus were starting to turn red. He’d never seen anything like it.”
― Emilie-Noelle Provost, The River is Everywhere

“I’d just placed my napkin on my lap when I noticed it: a hint of silver peeking out from beneath Ann’s dinner napkin . . . I was in the middle of taking a sip of water when I realized I was looking at a gun.”
― Emilie-Noelle Provost, The River is Everywhere

“New England is a dream handspun by good vibes.”
― Lakshya Bharadwaj

“Out in the distance, along the horizon of the steel-colored water, a whale-watching boat slowly made its way into the harbor. It imperceptibly moved in a straight-line past Bug Light. Nicknamed "America's Hometown," Plymouth was unique. It was a place where the old and new, the dead and the living, the ancient and the modern seamlessly coexisted. Its shores were a haven - an opportunity - for any who were willing to come and make it their home.”
― Juliette Rose Kerr, To Fill a Jar With Water

“New Hampshire was so often overlooked, overshadowed by the lush rolling hills and earnestly cool vibe of Vermont to its left and the breathtaking beauty of Maine on the right. It was the middle child of New England states; kind of weird, occasionally out of step, often forgotten. And yes, they did not require motorcyclists to wear helmets because of the whole live-free-or-die ethos, which was deeply rooted in every nook and cranny of the place. But to me it was magical; New Hampshire had an old soul. It was simple and complex, stoic and serene, and I felt utterly like myself when I was here.”
― Kate Spencer