Quotes

A fresh fall of snow blanketed the asylum grounds – not a Christmas sprinkle, but a man-high January deluge, the sort that snuffs out schools and offices and churches, and leaves, for a day or more, a pure, blank sheet in place of memo pads, date books and calendars. — Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, 1963

A great ocean beach runs north and south unbroken, mile lengthening into mile. Solitary and elemental, unsullied and remote, visited and possessed by the outer sea, these sands might be the end or the beginning of the world. — Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1928

A Texan is bragging to a New Englander. ‘In Texas,’ he drawls, ‘you can get on a train, ride all day long, and still be in Texas by nightfall.’
‘So what?’ replies the Yankee, ‘We have slow trains in Rhode Island, too.’ — An old joke

A Vermont year is nine months winter and three months of damn poor sleddin’,’ commented an old Vermont farmer whose grandfather had survived 1816, ‘better known as -eighteen hundred and froze to death.’ — Ray Bearse, Vermont: A Guide to the Green Mountain State, 1968

America, the new world, compares in glamour and romance with the old, and Boston Harbor is one of the most delightful places in America. — Edward Rowe Snow, The Islands of Boston Harbor, 1935

And the heavy night hung dark
The hills and waters o’er,
When a band of exiles moored their bark
On the wild New England shore. — Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1783-1835), British poet, The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers (l. 5-8)…

And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots
And the Cabots talk only to God. — John Collins Bossidy, Holy Cross alumni dinner, 1910

As a child of Maine, he knew better than to learn to swim in the water; the Maine water, in Wilbur Larch’s opinion, was for summer people and lobsters. — John Irving, Cider House Rules, 1985

As I set out across the lake, about noontime, the cook, emerging to draw molasses from the barrel, warned me to ‘watch out for reefs’ – rifts, that is, in the ice, where a warm current might have melted most of the way through. But the ice was solid, several inches thick, heavy enough to hold a team. There was only gladness in my heart as I started across the wide white plain toward the woods on the far-off shore. — Robert Smith, My Life in the North Woods, 1986

Basically, there are two New Englands, northern and southern, with plenty of shared schizophrenia between them… The Connecticut Yankee and the Maine Yankee may both trade on rurality for their wit, but the one is garrulous and the other taciturn. When the Bostonian tells a story the Vermonter becomes an ignorant hayseed; when the Vermonter tells a story the Bostonian is a pompous ignoramus. Usually in such a match there’s no contest; the Vermonter will inevitably prevail. — Jim Brunelle, The Best of New England Humor, 1990

Boston is a curious place… When a society has reached this point, it acquires a self-complacency which is wildly exasperating. My fingers itch to puncture it; to do something which will sting it into impropriety. — Henry Adams, letter of 1875

Boston is a good place to live in, taken all in all. Probably the best place in this neurotic world, with the possible exception of London, although I am not even sure about this. At any rate, it is the only place I care to live in. — John P. Marquand, The Late George Apley, 1937

Boston is a good town to write in – perhaps the best, just as New York is the best town to live in. — Edward Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)

Boy, I hated MIT. I worked my butt off for four long years. The only thing that saved my sanity was the 5:15 Club, named, I guess, for the guys who didn’t live on campus and took the 5:15 train back home. Yeah, right – 5:15, my tush! I never got home before midnight! — Tom Magliozzi, Cohost of ‘Car Talk’, from his ‘auto’ biography at Cartalk.cars.com

Criticizing Boston’s taxicabs is about as controversial as taking a stand against earthquakes, ax murderers, or the Third Reich… The drivers themselves are generally friendly but often topographically confused… No two rides are the same. No two taxis take you from Point A to Point B via Route C. And even if they do, the fares are somehow different. To enter a taxi in the Hub is to embark on a magical mystery tour of assorted mechanical surprises and geographic wonders. — Nathan Cobb, “Taxiing Toward a Fun City,” in Cityside/Countryside, 1980

Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit. — Norman Mailer (b. 1923), U.S. author, Timothy Madden, in Tough Guys Don’t Dance, ch. 1, Random House (1984).

Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit. — Norman Mailer, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, 1984

Every New England girl who lived within sound of the sea, four or five generations ago, counted a chowder kettle as an essential part of her ’setting out.’ When a bride left the family homestead, she carried with her a huge iron pot in which to make the hearty dish of fish, swimming in rich broth flavored with salt pork and onions. — Ella Shannon Bowles and Dorothy S. Towle, Secrets of New England Cooking, 1947

Everybody remembers the recipe for cooking a coot: put an ax in the pan with the coot, and when you can stick a fork in the ax the coot is done. — John Gould, ‘They Come High,’ in New England: The Four Seasons, 1980

From Harper’s Bazaar, which is my Bible, I learn that the Boston group in North Haven frown on new garments in their summer colony, and that a man in a new pair of sneakers is snubbed. ‘The older the clothes, the bluer the blood,’ says the writer… I am aging a pair of sneakers and a jacket in case I should meet a Bostonian in warm weather. — E.B. White, One Man’s Meat, 1944

Gentlemen, you are about to play football for Yale against Harvard. Never in your lives will you ever do anything as important. — T.A.D. Jones, Yale football coach, 1920

Hard work was not only necessary, but it was also noble; and to avoid it would lead to disgrace, dishonor, and probably, eventually, to Hell itself. If a true Yankee ran out of work, he was expected to look for more. — Lewis Hill, Fetched-Up Yankee, 2001

HARVARD BEATS YALE, 29 – 29 — Headline in the ‘Harvard Crimson’, after Harvard scored 16 points in the last 33 seconds of the 1968 football game

He loved winter more than the other seasons, loved a tender snowfall, loved the savage north wind and the blinding light off a frozen lake, loved most a blizzard which he faced head-on like a bison. He would not admit these things, however, because in his superstition he believed that by revealing desires about sacred subjects, such as weather and seasons, you would likely receive the opposite of what you wanted. — Ernest Herbert, The Dogs of March, 1979

I ate a grinder – elsewhere called a hero, hoagie, poorboy, submarine, sub, torpedo, Italian – and drank a chocolate frappe – elsewhere called a milkshake or malted. Although the true milkshake doesn’t exist east of the Appalachians, the grinder was the best thing to happen to me in a day: thinly sliced beef and ham, slivered tomatoes, chopped lettuce, and minced hot peppers, all dressed down with vinegar and oil. I wend back to the window to order another. — William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways, 1982

I had known something of New England village life long before I made my home in the same country as my imaginary Starkfield; though, during the years spent there, certain of its aspects became much more familiar to me. Even before that final initiation, however, I had had an uneasy sense that the New England of fiction bore little…resemblance to the harsh and beautiful land as I had seen it. — Edith Wharton,, introduction to Ethan Frome, 1911

I hung over the Concord River then as long as I could, and recalled how Thoreau, Hawthorne, Emerson himself, have expressed with due sympathy the sense of this full, slow, sleepy meadowy flood, which sets its pace and takes its twists like some large obese benevolent person, scarce so frankly unsociable as to pass you at all… [It] draws along the woods and the orchards and the fields with the purr of a mild domesticated cat who rubs against the family and furniture. — Henry James, The American Scene, 1907

I may as well say, what all men feel, that whilst our every amiable and very innocent representatives and senators at Washington are accomplished lawyers and merchants, and very eloquent at dinners and at caucuses, there is a disastrous want of men in New England. — Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher, Address delivered in Concord on the anniversary of the emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies, August 1, 1884, Miscellanies (1883, repr. 1903)

I reverently believe that the Maker who made us all makes everything in New England but the weather. I don’t know who makes that, but I think it must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerk’s factory who experiment and learn how…. In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four-and-twenty hours. — Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910), U.S. author, Speech at the New England Society’s 71st Annual Dinner, New York City. “The Weather,” Mark Twain’s Speeches, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (1923)

If it is no exaggeration to say that Deerfield is not so much a town as the ghost of a town, its dimness almost transparent, its quiet almost a cessation, it is essential to add that it is probably quite the most beautiful ghost of its kind, and with the deepest poetic and historic significance to be found in America… It is, and will probably always remain, the perfect and beautiful statement of the tragic and creative moment when one civilization is destroyed by another. — WPA Guide to Massachyusetts, 1937

In the Hancock, New Hampshire, historical society… is the town coffin, once used to bury the poor. (Thrifty Yankees, using the same coffin, and thriftier still – for years it was used as a chicken feeder on a farm.) — Howard Mansfield, In the Memory House, 1993

It is the consequence of this institution that not a school-house, a public pew, a bridge, a pound, a mill-dam, hath been set up, or pulled down, or altered, or bought, or sold, without the whole population of this town having a voice in the affair. A general contentment is the result. And the people truly feel that they are lords of the soil. In every winding road, in every stone fence, in the smokes of the poor-house chimney, in the clock on the church, they read their own power, and consider, at leisure, the wisdom and error of their judgments. — Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher, Speech given September 12, 1835 on the occasion of the second centennial anniversary of the town of Concord. “Historical Discourse at Concord,” Miscellanies (1883, repr. 1903)

It used to be said that, socially speaking, Philadelphia asked who a person is, New York how much is he worth, and Boston what does he know. Nationally it has now become generally recognized that Boston Society has long cared even more than Philadelphia about the first point and has refined the asking of who a person is to the point of demanding to know who he was. Philadelphia asks about a man’s parents; Boston wants to know about his grandparents. — Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonians, 1947

It was March in Vermont. Spring was filtering, seeping in like a wave in its tentative, halting, sometimes backtracking fashion – slow up the mountains, fast along the valleys. — Arturo Vivante, The Sugar Maples, Yankee magazine, March 1983

Look. And smell. Breathe deeply. Feel the air; touch it now and sense its purity, its vigor, its super-constant juvenation (that supposedly has given Vermonters their long life – if you discount their stubbornness). — Evan Hill, The Connecticut River, 1972

Maine lakes may still be observed during moments of soundlessness – in the pure luxury of quiet. Yet for those who long to hear those rare sounds once more, there is always the hope that there will be loons calling – breaking the silence with their wild arousing cries. — Lee Kingman, “Meditation in Maine,” in New England: The Four Seasons, 1980

Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the most sensitive of our writers, wrote, ‘Happiness is a butterfly which when pursued is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly may alight upon you.’ Early spring is like that. It is scarcely more tangible than the weight of a butterfly on you outstretched hand, and unless you pause quietly you will not know it is there at all. — Roy Barrette, A Countryman’s Journal, 1981

New England haunted the minds of Americans, who tried to read its riddle, as if for their soul’s good they must know what it meant… For it meant much to Americans that this old region should fare well, as their palladium of truth, justice, freedom and learning. They could not rest until they were reconciled to it, and until it was reconciled to them. — Van Wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer, 1940

New England is a finished place… It is the first American civilization to be finished, to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization, the first permanent civilization in America. — Bernard De Voto, Harper’s Magazine, March 1932

New England is quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can really take in. — Nathaniel Hawthorne, short story writer and novelist (1804-1864)

Nowhere in the United States of America does the wheel of the seasons turn more brilliantly than in New England. Winter’s blankets of white, the long-awaited buds of spring accompanied by the run of maple sap, summer’s bouquets, and the magnificent palette of autumn: all are feasts for the senses, and lead to the characteristic New England feeling of existing in tandem with, and often at the mercy of, the great forces of nature. — Tom Shachtman, The Most Beautiful Villages of New England, 1997

Say the words New England, and one person will think of a white church spire and a village green; another will see a covered bridge or the Vermont hills in autumn; and still another will conjure up a farm along the Connecticut River. For me, the words evoke the sounds and smells of the sea, and the storms and the fogs that make life along the New England seacoast a good deal like living on an actual ship, subject to the whims of the weather. — Nathaniel Benchley, “The Sea,” in New England: The Four Seasons, 1980

Some of us spend our lives preferring Fall to all the seasons… taking Spring only as prologue and Summer as the gently inclined platform leading all too slowly to the annual dazzle. — Donald Hall, Seasons at Eagle Pond, 1987

Somewhere along the line, Rhode Island became the standard by which all big things are compared. For reference, Alaska is 120 times the size of Rhode Island. — “Road Trip – Western Canada and Alaska”, June – October 1999, EarthRoamer.com

Summer person: ‘Nice little town, so old and quaint. But I suppose you have a lot of oddballs, too.’
Native: ‘Oh, yes, quite a few. You see ‘em around. But they’re mostly gone after Labor Day.’ — Adapted from Judson D. Hale, Sr., Inside New England, 1982

The aroma [in the farm kitchen] was a combination of wood smoke and hot iron, lingering cookery, drying mittens and socks, warming boots, barn clothes, wintering geraniums on the window sills, and the relaxed effluence of a lazy beagle toasting under the stove. — John Gould, Next Time Around, 1983

The average parent may, for example, plant an artist or fertilize a ballet dancer and end up with a certified public accountant. We cannot train children along chicken wire to make them grow in the right direction. Tying them to stakes is frowned upon, even in Massachusetts. — Ellen Goodman, Close to Home, 1979

The circulation manager of ‘Down East’ magazine sent a letter to Abner Mason of Damariscotta, Maine, notifying him that his subscription had expired. The notice came back a few days later with a scrawled message: ‘So’s Abner.’ — Judson D. Hale, Sr., Inside New England, 1982

The high-ceilinged rooms, the little balconies, alcoves, nooks and angles all suggest sanctuary, escape, creature comfort. The reader, the scholar, the browser, the borrower is king. — David McCord, On the Boston Athenaeum, Time, November 15, 1982

The infant [Amherst] college is an Infant Hercules. Never was so much striving, outstretching, and advancing in a literary cause as is exhibited here. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1823

The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February. — Joseph Wood Krutch, American Naturalist and Writer, 1893-1970

The New England conscience … does not stop you from doing what you shouldn’t – it just stops you from enjoying it. — Cleveland Amory (b. 1917), U.S. author, New York (May 5, 1980)

The old Boston Garden seats, some of which are placed here, were, as we remembered not much fun to sit in. The museum displays a sense of humor, by placing one seat behind a pole, symbolizing the 1,895 such seats. — Jim Sullivan, on the Sports Museum of New England, “Take Me Out To,” Boston Globe, April 11, 2002

The peculiarity of the New England hermit has not been his desire to get near to God but his anxiety to get away from man. — Hamilton Wright Mabie (1845-1916)

The Puritans, to keep the remembrance of their unity one with another, and of their peaceful compact with the Indians, named their forest settlement CONCORD. — Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher, Speech, September 12, 1835, on the occasion of the second centennial anniversary of the town of Concord. “Historical Discourse at Concord,” Miscellanies (1883, repr. 1903)

The secret to cooking lobsters is not to murder them. Give them a nice respectable way out. Don’t put them in boiling water and don’t drown them in too much water… I put in two inches of water, whether I’m cooking two lobsters or 14… When the water is boiling, put in the lobsters, put the lid on, and steam them for 20 minutes, not a minute less and not a minute more. — Bertha Nunan, Yankee Magazine, June 1979

The world of New England is in that house – spidery, like crackling skeletons rotting in the attic – dry bones. It’s like a tombstone to sailors lost at sea, the Olson ancestor who fell from the yardarm of a square-rigger and was never found. It’s the doorway of the sea to me, of mussels and clams and sea monsters and whales. — Andrew Wyeth, on the home of his model Christina Olson in Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life by Richard Meryman, 1996

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes. — John Updike (b. 1932), U.S. author, critic, The Statesman Buchanan, in Buchanan Dying, Act 2 (1974)

Thirty below freezing! It was inconceivable till one stepped out into it at midnight and the shock of that clear, still air took away the breath as does a plunge into sea-water. — Rudyard Kipling, on his arrival in Vermont, February 1892

This can be a cold place, Boston, and the weather is the least of it. We’re often unwelcoming to outsiders. We have a maddening trait of sniping at insiders. We have equal parts determination and aloofness proudly bred into our native bones like the hunting instincts in a championship dog. — Brian McGrory, The Boston Globe, March 15, 2002

This stream may perhaps with more propriety than any other in the world be named the beautiful river. From Stuart to the Sound it uniformly maintains this character. The purity, salubrity and sweetness of its waters; the frequency and elegance of its meanders; its absolute freedom from all aquatic vegetables; the uncommon and universal beauty of its banks, here a smooth and winding beach, there covered with rich verdure, now fringed with bushes, now covered with lofty trees, and now formed by the intruding hill, the rude bluff and the shaggy mountain – are objects which no traveler can thoroughly describe. — Timothy Dwight, on the Connecticut River, early 1800s

Three days we call a visit. According to established usage, if our friends stay more than three days it is expected they will do chores night and morning. — Henry Stevens of Vermont, in a letter to Edward Fairbanks, October 10, 1860

To the rest of the country, New England has always stood in much the same relation as England has to America – that of spiritual homeland and mother country. — B.A. Botkin, author of A Treasury of New England Folklore

What are springs and waterfalls? Here is the spring of springs, the waterfall of waterfalls. A storm in the fall or winter is the time to visit it; a light house or a fisherman’s hut the true hotel. A man may stand there and put all America behind him. — Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod, 1865

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 people who have never lived in New Hampshire or Vermont visit here, they often say they feel like they’ve come home. Our urban center, commercial districts, small villages and industrial enterprises are set amid farmlands and forests. This is a landscape in which the natural and built environments are balanced on a human scale. This delicate balance is the nature of our ‘community character.’ It’s important to strengthen our distinctive, traditional settlement patterns to counteract the commercial and residential sprawl that upsets this balance and destroys our economic and social stability. — Richard J. Eward, Proud to Live Here

Yes, one fo the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it. There is only one thing certain about it: you are certain there is going to be plenty of it. — Mark Twain, Speech at New England Society dinner, December 22, 1876

[A] Connecticut River Valley farmer… was told that his farm… was really in New Hampshire, instead of in Vermont as he’d always thought. ‘Thank God,’ he said, ‘I didn’t think I could stand another one of those Vermont winters.’ — Evan Hill, The Connecticut River, 1972

[New England villages] are one of the great sights of the western world – red buildings to house the cattle, white ones to hold the spirit, and trees like the spirit itself abroad on the countryside. — Jane Langton, “New england Classic,” in New England: The Four Seasons, 1980

[The Pilgrim Fathers] fell upon an ungenial climate, where there were nine months of winter and three months of cold weather and that called out the best energies of the men, and of the women too, to get a mere subsistence out of the soil, with such a climate. In their efforts to do that they cultivated industry and frugality at the same time – which is the real foundation of the greatness of the Pilgrims. — Ulysses S. Grant, speech at New England Society dinner, December 22, 1880