Kate Douglas Wiggin was an American children’s story author and educationist, credited for establishing America’s first kindergarten in 1878. Wiggin was not only instrumental in starting ‘Silver Street Free Kindergarten’ in San Francisco but also teamed up with her sister to create a training school for teachers who wished to work in kindergartens. As an author, she was most famous for her children’s story books and some of the noted titles include ‘A Child’s Journey With Dickens’, ‘Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm’, ‘Rose O’ The River’, ‘New Chronicles of Rebecca’, ‘The Romance of a Christmas Card’, ‘Penelope’s Travels in Scotland’ and ‘A Summer in a Canon: A California Story’ among many others. Other than being a highly popular author of the time, Wiggin was also involved in child welfare in an era when the subject was hardly ever discussed. She spent her adult life in trying to improve the lives of children in any way she could. On the other hand, she was also a prolific traveller and her experiences in travelling to different parts of the world were then reflected in the stories that she wrote. We have excerpted few famous quotes and sayings by the acclaimed writer from her writings, books, work and life. Presenting a collection of thoughts and quotations by Kate Douglas Wiggin that exhibit her love for children and life.
Most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes, by dozens and hundreds. Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers, and sisters, aunts and cousins, but only one mother in the whole world.
Maternal love, like an orange tree, buds and blossoms and bears at once. When a woman puts her finger for the first time into the tiny hand of her baby and feels that helpless clutch which tightens her very heartstrings, she is born again with her newborn child.
Never miss a joy in this world of trouble-that's my theory!....
Happiness, like mercy,is twice blest: it blesses those most
intimately associated with it and it blesses all those who see
it, hear it, touch it or breathe the same atmosphere.
If I haven't anything to write, I am just as anxious to 'take my pen in hand' as though I had a message to deliver, a cause to plead, or a problem to unfold. Nothing but writing rests me; only then do I seem completely myself!
... there is nothing so debilitating to a naturally weak sense of humor as selling tickets behind a grating ...
Kate Douglas Wiggin
Please drop a note to the clerk of the weather, and have a good, rousing snow-storm -- say on the twenty-second. None of your meek, gentle, nonsensical, shilly-shallying snow-storms; not the sort where the flakes float lazily down from the sky as if they didn't care whether they ever got here or not, and then melt away as soon as they touch the earth, but a regular business-like whizzing, whirring, blurring, cutting snow-storm, warranted to freeze and stay on!
Kate Douglas Wiggin
If you make children happy now, you will make them happy twenty years hence by the memory of it.
To make my diary a little different I am going to call it a Thought Book ... I have thoughts that I never can use unlesss I write them down, for Aunt Miranda always says, Keep your thoughts to yourself.
It was not long after sunrise, and Stephen Waterman, fresh from his dip in the river, had scrambled up the hillside from the hut in the alder-bushes where he had made his morning toilet.
There are certain narrow, umimaginative, and autocratic old people who seem to call out the most mischievous and sometimes the worst traits in children.
The habit of generalizing from one particular, that mainstay of the cheap and obvious essayist, has rooted many fictions in the public eye. Nothing, for example can blot from my memory the profound, searching, and exhaustive analysis of a great nation which I learned in my small geography when I was a child, namely, 'The French are a gay and polite people fond of dancing and light wines.
The old stage coach was rumbling along the dusty road that runs from Maplewood to Riverboro. The day was as warm as midsummer, though it was only the middle of May, and Mr. Jeremiah Cobb was favoring the horses as much as possible, yet never losing sight of the fact that he carried the mail. The hills were many, and the reins lay loosely in his hands as he lolled back in his seat and extended one foot and leg luxuriously over the dashboard. His brimmed hat of worn felt was well pulled over his eyes, and revolved a quid of tobacco in his left cheek.
Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful World,
With the wonderful water round you curled,
And the wonderful grass upon your breast,
World, you are beautifully drest!
The soul grows into lovely habits as easily as into ugly ones, and the moment a life begins to blossom into beautiful words and deeds, that moment a new standard of conduct is established, and your eager neighbors look to you for a continuous manifestation of the good cheer, the sympathy, the ready wit, the comradeship, or the inspiration, you once showed yourself capable of. Bear figs for a season or two, and the world outside the orchard is very unwilling you should bear thistles.
The world is always a new plaything to children, while to the old it seems falling to pieces from sheer dryness. Everything loses its value with time, but it is not the fault of the fruit, but of the mouth and the tongue.
