53 Quotes by Elizabeth George Speare

If you ask me, it’s all that schooling. It takes the fun out of life, being cooped up like that day after day... Books, now that’s different. There’s nothing like a book to keep you company of a long voyage.

Tis so beautiful – flowers every day of the year. You can always smell them in the air, even out to sea.

I can still see the green feathers if I look hard enough. But they’ve done their best to make you into a sparrow, haven’t they?

The girl looked about her. “’ Tis a pretty room,” she said without thinking, and then wondered how that could be, when it was so plain and bare. Perhaps it was only the sunlight on boards that were scrubbed smooth and white, or perhaps it was the feeling of peace that lay across the room as tangibly as the bar of sunshine.

Then, unbelievably, out of the mist came the miracle. First two points of mast, then sails, transparent and wraithlike in the fog, then, as Kit strained her eyes, the looming hull, the prow, and the curved tail of a fish. The Dolphin! Glory be to heaven! The most beautiful sight in the world! The Dolphin, moving down toward Wright’s Island on a steady breeze.

She rolled over and stretched, blinking up at the blue sky. The tips of the long grasses swished gently in the breeze. The hot sun pressed down on her so that she felt hot and empty. Slowly, the meadow began to fulfill its promise.

The one small room the house contained was scoured as a seashell. There was a table, a chest, a bedstead with a faded quilt, a spinning wheel, and a small loom. A few ancient kettles hung about the clean-swept hearth. From a square of sunlight on the floor an enormous yellow cat opened one eye to look at them.

She saw now that she could not tell him about the books she had loved any more than she could make him see the palm trees swaying under a brilliant blue sky.

If only I could be here alone, without Judith or anyone, she thought with longing. Someday I am going to come back to this place, when there is time just to stand still and look at it. How often she would come back she had no way of foreseeing, nor could she know that never, in the months to come, would the Meadows break the promise they held for her at this moment, a promise of peace and quietness and of comfort for a troubled heart.