Bess Streeter Aldrich Quotes
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The greatest antidote in the world for grief is work, and the necessity of work.
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Love is the light that you see by.
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Some girls are apparently born with dates; some through much personal activity, achieve them; but others seem by necessity to have dates thrust upon them.
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...Mabel put on the boiled potatos, unmashed, the stewed tomatos, some inferior dried beef, and some bread that plainly said, 'Darling, I am growing old'.
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There is no division nor subtraction in the heart-arithmetic of a good mother. There are only addition and multiplication.
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A person may encircle the globe with mind open only to bodily comfort. Another may live his life on a sixty-foot lot and listen to the voices of the universe.
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It was true, she thought, that the big things awe us but the little things touch us.
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There ought to be a home for children to come to,—and their children,—a central place, to which they could always bring their joys and sorrows,—an old familiar place for them to return to on Sundays and Christmases. An old home ought always to stand like a mother with open arms. It ought to be here waiting for the children to come to it,—like homing pigeons.
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Home was something besides so much lumber and plaster. You built your thoughts into the frame work. You planted a little of your heart with the trees and the shrubbery.
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Abbie Deal went happily about her work, one baby in her arms and the other at her skirts, courage her lode-star and love her guide, – a song upon her lips and a lantern in her hand.
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Humans are queer. A man, living and well, is ignored or criticized. Dying or dead, he is noticed and praised. Death sheds a temporary glamour over the poorest soul. It is as though in dying, he has accomplished something which life never gave him.
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She wondered why she, herself, was always touched by such infinitesimal things. Their very homeliness and lack of worth seemed connecting the past with the present all the more. It was true, she thought, that the big things awe us but the little things touch us.
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You can't evade a thing. Those who try to get around it are weak. Those who meet it gallantly are strong. So many women try to dodge life. They don't economize because it's inconvenient. They don't work because it's tiring. They don't have a child because it's painful. They don't look at the dead because it's saddening. Face them all, Laura. Face them squarely and meet them gallantly... as your grandmother did. For every one of the old experiences will be there... birth... marriage... death... disappointment... grief... little joys... little sorrows. You'll have to meet them all. It's part of the story...
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That was the trouble of being old. Your body no longer obeyed you. It did unruly and unreasonable things. An eye suddenly might not see for a moment. Your knees gave out at the wrong time, so that when you thought you were walking north, you might find yourself going a little northwest. Your brain, too, had that same flighty trick. You might be speaking of something and forget it temporarily,—your mind going off at a little to the northwest, too, so to speak.
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Katherine it was who took upon herself the complete charge of Junior's speech. Not an insignificant "have went" nor an infinitesimal "I seen" ever escaped the keen ears of his eldest sister, who immediately corrected him. Mother sometimes thought Katherine a little severe when, in the interest of proper speaking, she would stop him in the midst of an exciting account of a home-run. There were times, thought Mother, when the spirit of the thing was so much more important than the flesh in which it was clothed.
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He Sam wrote it with great flourishes, his hand making many dizzy elliptical journeys before it settled down to make a elaborate 'E' with a curving tail as long as some prehistoric baboons.
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...The last name had been entered by Samuel Peters' agile pen with much shading of downward strokes and many extra corkscrew appendages...
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When the country was new, homes, like dresses, were constructed more for wearing qualities than beauty.
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Life was meant to be warm and happy and lovely. Life was meant to be a sweet unhampered thing, joyful and gay. It should have everything in it,--wealth and travel and happiness and a career and friends and Allen. And if it couldn't have them all . . . oh, it ought to have Allen. It ought, anyway, to have Allen.... It had been as though in that one brief bitter-sweet moment, she had been swept again into some haven, had become the center of some great plan.
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Thoughts are acrobats, agile and quite often untrustworthy.
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It takes a small town to keep you humble.
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Christmas Eve was a night of song that wrapped itself about you like a shawl. But it warmed more than your body. It warmed your heart...filled it, too, with melody that would last forever.
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We're all inclined to think we have a monopoly on each new sensation that comes to us, that it's our own particular little grievance. But every feeling and every thought you may have now has probably been felt and thought by mothers from the time the world began.
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Not all clever words are true. ... And inversely most things that are true are not clever.