Our Thanksgiving Day, becoming the focus, as it were, of the private life and virtues of the people, should be hallowed and exalted, and made the day of generous deeds and innocent enjoyments, of noble aspirations and heavenly hopes.

- Sarah J. Hale

What we're really talking about is a wonderful day set aside on the fourth Thursday of November when no one diets. I mean, why else would they call it Thanksgiving?

- Erma Bombeck

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

- George Bernard Shaw

Mother's Day, it's beautiful thought, but it's somebody's hurtin' conscience that thought of the idea. It was someone who had neglected their mother for years, and then they figured out: I got to do something about Momma. And knowing Momma was that easy, they figured, "we'll give her a day, and it will be all right with Momma." Give her a day, and then in return Momma gives you the other 364. See?

- Will Rogers

Thanksgiving is so called because we are all so thankful that it only comes once a year.

- P. J. O'Rourke

It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.

- Alistair Cooke

There is one day that is ours. There is one day when all we Americans who are not self-made go back to the old home to eat saleratus biscuits and marvel how much nearer to the porch the old pump looks than it used to. Thanksgiving Day is the one day that is purely American.

- O. Henry

Remember this December, that love weighs more than gold!

- Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon

Thanksgiving was never meant to be shut up in a single day.

- Robert Caspar Lintner

The holiest of holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart.

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Before the ice is in the pools,
Before the skaters go,
Or any cheek at nightfall
Is tarnished by the snow,
Before the fields have finished,
Before the Christmas tree,
Wonder upon wonder
Will arrive to me!

- Emily Dickinson

Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.

- Hamilton Wright Mabie