Misquote note: Fisher’s original quote has been incorrectly cited by a number of print & Internet sources.

Canfield’s original verse:  “[A] mother is not a person to lean upon, but a person to making leaning unnecessary.”

Misquote/paraphrase: “A mother is not someone you lean on. A mother is someone who makes leaning unnecessary.”

Extended excerpt [Fiction]: “

How long it took her to learn! She was as sentimental and complacent as ever. She had taken for mother-love her enjoyment of Ralph’s leaning on her. As if these later, savagely admonitory years and her love for Dids had not taught her that a mother is not a person to lean upon, but a person to make leaning unnecessary.” (p. 275)

Source: Library – Her Son’s Wife (1926|Nov. 1927 edition) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 918533321

Extended excerpt:

“What he wanted to tell his young listeners was that they must go on from where the old-American zeal for freedom left off; to tell them that freedom is not worth fighting for if it means no more than license for everyone to get as much as he can for himself. And freedom is worth fighting for. Because it does mean more than unrestricted grabbing.” (p. 362)

Source: Library – Thus Be It Ever: A Heritage of Freedom (1942) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 1563603

Extended excerpt  [Fiction – short story]:

“At lunch he went out of his way in the cafeteria to sit at the same table with Francis, ostentatiously familiar with him, and after work he let trolley after trolley go by the corner where he waited till Francis arrived. Knowing that he had been punished for being too fresh, he was impelled, by the fatality that hangs over people who have struck a false note, to strike it yet more loudly.” (p. 45)

Source: Library – The Best Short Stories 1936 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story (1936) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 13724519

Extended excerpt [Essay]:

“Our fathers’ generation thought naïvely, and so did we in our youth, that the insane wish to burn and crush and destroy those irreplaceable seeds was a forgotten wickedness of the unenlightened dark centuries far behind us. The revelation which comes to us in our late maturity and to our younger generation as they first emerge into adult life, that intellectual freedom is above every other element in human life marked down for savage destruction by the totalitarian state, gives us an electrifying warning to look well to the defenses of our libraries. They are far more than the founders thought, far more even than rich treasure houses of taste, beauty, enjoyment and abstract scientific information – they are in the last analysis, as the monastic libraries of the Dark Ages proved, the vessels in which the seed corn for the future is stored.” (p. 27)

Source link: The Library of Tomorrow: A Symposium (1939) online via Universal Digital Library & Internet Archive: https://archive.org/stream/libraryoftomorro011512mbp#page/n41/mode/2up

Misattribution note: A few sources have mistakenly attributed the quote to author & publisher William Feather. We could find no evidence that Feather wrote the words, and Canfield Fisher has been widely attributed as the source of the quote following the 1929 publication of her original essay.

Extended excerpt [Essay]:

“One of the many things which nobody (especially the poets) ever tells you about being middle- aged is that it is such a nice change from being young. Honestly, I mean it. Why not admit it? One of the traits of human nature about which there is absolute unanimity of opinion is its love for change, its never-failing tendency to get tired of what it has had and be ready for something new.” (p. 84, column 1)

Source note: Fisher also added: “Here are the pleasures of middle age, of which nobody breathes a word to you beforehand. The deliciousness of outgrowing that neuralgia of youthful pain at being surpassed in anything. The serenity of pleasure taken in other people’s accomplishments unspoiled by the aching comparison of them with our own.”

Source: Editor’s copy – “I am Fifty and it Doesn’t Hurt a Bit” (April 1929) The American Magazine, Vol. CVII

Extended excerpt [Fiction]:

“Well, I haven’t any personal experience with death in my immediate circle either,” said Sylvia. “But I wasn’t brought up with the usual cult of the awfulness of it. Father was always anxious that we children should feel it something as natural as breathing – you are dipped up from the great river of consciousness, and death only pours you back. If you’ve been worth living, there are more elements of fineness in humanity.” (p. 345)

Source link: The Bent Twig (1915) online via Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=fWdKAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA345&dq=You+are+dipped+up+from+the+great+river+of+consciousness,+and+death+only+pours